Subscription and Recurring Payment Instructions for a Trusted Friend: A Perth Carer’s Plan for an Aging Parent

You’re in Perth looking after a parent whose memory is slipping. Their card is on file with a streaming service, two newspapers, a gym membership they haven’t used in eighteen months, an old antivirus subscription, a monthly donation to a charity they care about, and the electricity bill on auto-debit. The closest family member is in Melbourne. The plan is to give a trusted local friend a clear list of every recurring charge — what it’s for, which card it hits, and how to cancel each one — without ever sharing a password or PIN.

The problem

Recurring charges don’t stop when capacity goes, and they don’t stop when someone dies. They keep debiting the same card month after month until somebody notices, requests cancellation, and provides whatever evidence each merchant demands. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on estate planning is explicit that executors are responsible for identifying and closing down a deceased person’s financial affairs — but executors can only close what they can find. Subscriptions are notoriously hard to find because the only record is often a line item on a bank statement labelled with a cryptic merchant code.

For an aging parent in Perth with a friend (not family) as the nominated contact, the gap widens. The friend has agreed to help. They don’t have the parent’s email. They don’t know which streaming services exist, which gym the membership is at, or which charity gets the monthly donation. Without a prepared inventory, the friend is reverse-engineering a year of bank statements while charges keep accruing. Estates routinely lose four-figure sums to forgotten subscriptions before anyone catches up.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you (or you with your parent, while capacity is still intact) record what recurring charges exist, where to find them, and who should know. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per subscription: the merchant name, what the service is for, the linked payment method (e.g. “Westpac Visa ending 4412” — not the card number), the approximate amount and frequency, and a cancellation note (URL to a cancellation page, a phone number, or the email address the account is held under). It does NOT hold your parent’s passwords, card numbers, banking logins, or MyGov credentials. The trusted friend sees the inventory you’ve prepared for them, only when you’ve released it.

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.

How it works

  1. You add each recurring charge to your parent’s vault — merchant name, purpose, linked card or direct debit account, rough monthly amount, cancellation method.
  2. You name the trusted friend as the recipient for the subscriptions module and they accept (the vault records their consent, which matters under the Australian Privacy Principles because you’re naming a third party).
  3. You tag essential utilities (electricity, water, internet) separately from discretionary subscriptions, so the friend knows what to keep running and what to cancel.
  4. On the release trigger you set — incapacity confirmed, or after death — the friend is notified and sees only the subscriptions module, not your parent’s other modules unless you’ve released them too.
  5. The friend works through the list, cancelling each merchant directly using the contact method you’ve recorded. The vault accelerates the finding step; the merchant still runs their own cancellation process.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth households often have nominated contacts who live three or four hours away by plane — adult children in Melbourne or Sydney, or interstate siblings who can’t easily come over to sit at a kitchen table and reconstruct a year of bank statements. A local trusted friend is frequently the practical choice for the day-to-day work of unwinding affairs, but the friend has no inherent visibility into the parent’s financial life. A prepared inventory is the difference between a friend who can call the gym, the streaming service, and the charity on a Tuesday afternoon — and a friend who’s apologising to the executor six months later for the four hundred dollars in charges that slipped past.

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 a first subscriptions module on behalf of an aging parent. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what’s charging your parent’s card and how a trusted friend can stop it — not the card number, not the passwords, and not the money.