Online Account Instructions for Your Sibling: A Perth Carer’s Plan for Your Parent’s Digital Life

You’re the one in Perth who drives Mum or Dad to specialist appointments, sorts the bills, and notices when something’s off. Your sibling lives interstate or overseas and gets the updates. Between you, you’ve never quite worked out who knows what about your parent’s email, the iCloud account with forty years of family photos, the Facebook profile, the loyalty programs, the password manager neither of you has ever opened. The plan is to leave your sibling a clear inventory — what accounts exist and how to reach the providers — without ever sharing a single password.

The problem

Online accounts are the part of an estate that goes missing most quietly. There’s no bank statement that lists them, no super fund letter, no will clause that enumerates them. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance covers the formal assets a will captures — but email accounts, photo libraries, and social profiles sit outside that, governed by each provider’s own deceased-user process. Those processes vary wildly, and almost every one requires the family to name the account before recovery can start.

For a carer of an aging parent, two scenarios bite. First, capacity loss: your parent is still alive but can’t manage their own accounts, and you and your sibling need to know what’s there to keep bills paid and identity-fraud risks contained. Second, death: your sibling is co-executor or next of kin, and the photos and correspondence vanish behind a login no one wrote down. In both cases, the missing piece is rarely the password — providers can sometimes work around that. The missing piece is an inventory: which accounts existed in the first place.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what your parent owns online, 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 name, the username or email identifier, whether a recovery contact has been set up, and your parent’s preference for closure, memorialisation, or download. It does NOT hold passwords, recovery codes, 2FA seeds, or password manager master passwords. Your sibling sees the inventory you’ve prepared for them, only when you’ve authorised release.

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’s what keeps it outside the AFSL regime and outside AUSTRAC reporting — and it’s also why it can be a simple subscription rather than a regulated product. Because the inventory is personal information about your parent and the named recipient, it’s held under Australian Privacy Principles consistent with the Privacy Act 1988.

How it works

  1. Sitting with your parent (or working from what you already manage on their behalf), you add each online account to the vault — provider, username or email, whether a recovery contact is set, and your parent’s closure preference.
  2. You name your sibling as the recipient for the online accounts module and they accept; the vault records their consent.
  3. You note any provider-specific arrangements already in place — Google Inactive Account Manager, Apple Legacy Contact, Facebook Legacy Contact — so your sibling knows which providers will let them in via the provider’s own process.
  4. If something happens, your sibling is notified per your release rules and sees only the online accounts instructions module — not your parent’s other modules unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your sibling works through the inventory provider by provider, using each platform’s deceased-user or incapacity process. The vault gives them the list; the providers control access.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth families are some of the most geographically split in the country — one adult child in Perth doing the hands-on care, siblings in Melbourne, Sydney, London, or the goldfields. When something happens to a parent, the Perth carer is often the one already named on the medical paperwork, while the sibling has to coordinate the estate from a different time zone. A clear, pre-prepared inventory of online accounts means your sibling isn’t trying to guess at 2am whether Mum had a Gmail account or a Hotmail one, or whether the iPad photos were syncing to iCloud or sitting on the device. The vault turns “we’ll have to work it out” into a one-page list.

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 sibling can find it — not passwords, not recovery codes, and not 2FA seeds.