Online Account Instructions for Your Parent’s Executor: A Perth Carer’s Inventory for the Estate

You’re the adult child sorting out your mother’s affairs while she’s still here to help you do it. She lives in Perth, you live nearby, and between her old Hotmail address, the Gmail she uses now, a Facebook account she barely touches, twenty years of photos in iCloud, and a Coles Flybuys balance she’s proud of, there’s a digital footprint that her executor — likely you, or your sibling — will need to find, close, or preserve. The plan is to write down what exists, where, and who to contact, without ever writing down a password.

The problem

When an older Australian dies, the executor named in the will is responsible for identifying and administering everything in the estate. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on wills and estate planning is clear that the executor’s first job is to locate assets and notify institutions — but online accounts are the category that most often defeats that process. There’s no central registry. No statement arrives in the post for a dormant Yahoo address or an old Instagram handle. Photos sit in a cloud account no one can name. Provider deceased-user processes vary widely, and recovery is sometimes impossible once the account holder is gone.

Your parent’s executor doesn’t need her passwords. They need to know which accounts exist, what email or username identifies each one, whether a recovery contact has been set up, and what your mother wanted done with each — close it, memorialise it, download the photos first. Without that inventory, family photos go dark, subscriptions keep billing the estate, and the Facebook account stays up indefinitely because no one can prove who should take it down.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what your parent has, where to find it, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per online account: the provider (Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, the loyalty program), the username or email identifier, whether a recovery contact or legacy contact has been set up at the provider, and your parent’s preference for closure, memorialisation, or download-and-preserve. The vault does NOT hold passwords, recovery codes, or 2FA seeds — those stay with your parent, or with whatever password manager she already uses.

The boundary matters: the Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not an advice service. It’s an instructions register. That keeps it outside the AFSL regime and outside AUSTRAC reporting — and it’s also why your parent’s personal information inside the vault is governed by the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles like any other personal data holding, not by financial-services rules that would slow everything down.

How it works

  1. You sit down with your parent and add each online account to her vault — provider, username, the email address used for recovery, whether a legacy contact is configured at Google or Apple.
  2. For each account, you record her preference: close, memorialise (Facebook, Instagram), or download-and-preserve (iCloud Photos, Google Photos).
  3. You name the executor from her will as the recipient for the online accounts module. The executor accepts and the vault records their consent.
  4. If something happens, the executor is notified per the release rules your parent set and sees only the online accounts module — not her superannuation or banking modules unless those were also released to them.
  5. The executor works through the inventory, contacting each provider with a death certificate and following that provider’s deceased-user process. The vault accelerates the finding step; it does not override any provider’s policy.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth families often manage aging-parent affairs across a distance — siblings interstate, an executor in Melbourne or Sydney, the parent and primary carer here in WA. When the time comes, the executor may be working from a different time zone with no physical access to a desk, a filing cabinet, or the old laptop in the spare room. An instruction set prepared in advance — what accounts exist, what each one holds, what your mother wanted done with it — is often the difference between an executor closing the digital estate in weeks and a family losing access to two decades of photos because no one knew the iCloud address.

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 of aging parents in Perth can register their first online accounts module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your parent’s executor can find it — not passwords, not recovery codes, and not the accounts themselves.