Investment Instructions for Your Sibling: A Perth Carer’s Plan for Mum or Dad’s Shares, ETFs and Crypto

You’re the one in Perth who drives Mum to her specialist appointments and helps Dad with the internet banking when it locks him out again. Your sibling is interstate or overseas, and the unspoken agreement is that you handle the day-to-day while they’ll step in if capacity goes or when the time comes. Between your parent’s CommSec account from the 1990s, two ETFs bought through a newer broker, a term deposit at a regional bank, and the Bitcoin your father bought “for a laugh” in 2017, nobody — including your sibling — has a clean list of what exists.

The problem

Australian estates regularly lose track of investment holdings because there is no central registry of who owns what. A HIN sits with one broker; an SRN sits with the share registry; an ETF account sits with another platform; crypto sits on an exchange or — worse — on a hardware wallet in a drawer. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on crypto-assets is explicit that lost keys mean lost coins and that crypto sits outside the consumer protections that apply to regulated financial products. ASIC’s estate planning guidance also reminds families that assets the executor cannot prove existed are effectively gone.

For a carer, the risk is sharper. If your parent loses capacity before death, your sibling needs to know what to look for to support an enduring power of attorney, an administration application at the State Administrative Tribunal in WA, or simply a conversation with the broker. If you are hit by a bus first, your sibling is left guessing at what you knew about Mum or Dad’s affairs — and the small crypto holding nobody mentioned becomes the parcel the family wastes weeks searching for.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register for individuals and families. The simplified version records, for each of your parent’s investment holdings: the issuer or platform (CommSec, SelfWealth, Vanguard, BTC Markets, the share registry), the account identifier (HIN, SRN, member number, exchange account reference), the asset class (direct shares, ETF, managed fund, term deposit, bond, crypto), and any notes about where supporting documents live — the filing cabinet, the accountant, the safe deposit box.

The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not your parent’s keys, recovery phrases, or hardware wallet PINs. It does not hold broker passwords, exchange logins, two-factor codes, or seed phrases. It is not a custody service and not financial advice on what to buy, hold, or sell. That boundary is deliberate: it keeps the Digital Legacy Vault outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6 and outside AUSTRAC’s AML/CTF reporting obligations, which is why it can run as a simple subscription rather than a regulated financial product.

How it works

  1. You sit with your parent (or work from the records you already manage) and add each holding to the vault — issuer, account identifier, asset class, supporting-document location.
  2. You name your sibling as the recipient for the investments module. The vault records their consent under the Australian Privacy Principles before any release.
  3. You set the release rules: on confirmed capacity loss, on death, or on a manual trigger by you.
  4. When a trigger fires, your sibling is notified and sees only the investments instructions you prepared — not the medical module, not the funeral preferences, unless you have released those too.
  5. Your sibling takes the inventory to the broker, the share registry, and the exchange. For crypto, they can confirm what existed and rule out a fruitless search for assets that never did — even if the keys are unrecoverable.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth carers often coordinate from the western edge of a family scattered across the country. When capacity declines, the State Administrative Tribunal in WA can appoint an administrator under the Guardianship and Administration Act 1990 (WA), and that administrator — often a family member — needs a starting list of accounts to manage. After death, the Supreme Court of Western Australia grants probate against the estate the executor can describe. In both cases, the carer’s private knowledge of “what Dad owns” only helps if it has been written down somewhere the sibling can actually reach.

Sources

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when the Digital Legacy Vault opens for Perth carers

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when carers in Perth can register an investments module on behalf of an aging parent. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not your parent’s broker passwords, exchange logins, recovery phrases, or hardware wallet PINs.