Subscription Instructions for Your Executor: A Perth Carer’s Plan for Stopping the Quiet Drain

You’re in Perth, helping your mum or dad get their affairs in order while they’re still well enough to remember the details. Between the two of them there’s probably a Netflix account, a Stan they forgot they signed up to, two streaming services billed to an old credit card, a gym membership that’s been frozen since 2022, professional memberships from a career that ended a decade ago, and a recurring donation to a charity they meant to cancel after the bushfires. None of it is in one place. The plan is to leave the executor a clean list — what’s charging what, on which card, and how to cancel each one — without ever sharing a password.

The problem

Subscriptions are the slowest leak in an estate. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance is clear that the executor’s job is to gather assets, pay debts, and distribute what’s left — but nothing in the will tells the executor that a $17.99 streaming charge has been hitting the Visa every month for four years, or that a professional body has been auto-renewing a $480 annual membership the deceased stopped using in 2019. The executor finds these only by working backwards through bank statements, line by line, and only after probate gives them authority to ask the bank for the statements in the first place.

In the meantime, the charges keep running. Estates routinely lose four-figure sums to subscriptions that nobody noticed before the executor caught up. Worse, the executor often can’t cancel the subscription directly — many providers require the account holder’s email, and the email account is itself locked. So a small admin task turns into months of correspondence with overseas support desks.

Your parent doesn’t need to share a single password to fix this. The executor needs to know: what’s recurring, on which payment method, billed by which provider, and what each provider’s cancellation process looks like.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what exists, where to find it, and who you’ve named to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per recurring charge: the service name, the billing frequency and approximate amount, the last four digits of the linked payment card, the email address the account is registered to, and a note on the provider’s cancellation pathway (web form, phone, written notice period). It does NOT hold the login password, the card number, or the email account credentials. The executor 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 the vault outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6 and outside AUSTRAC reporting obligations.

How it works

  1. You sit down with your parent and walk through their last three months of bank and credit card statements, listing every recurring charge.
  2. You add each subscription to the vault — provider name, billing cycle, approximate amount, linked card (last four digits only), registered email, and cancellation method.
  3. You name the executor as the recipient for the subscriptions module and they accept (the vault records their consent under standard privacy principles for handling personal information of third parties).
  4. If something happens, the executor is notified per your release rules and sees only the subscriptions instructions module — not the rest of the estate inventory unless you’ve released those modules too.
  5. The executor works the list provider by provider, cancelling each one with proof of death where required. The vault accelerates the finding step; the executor still does the cancelling under their legal authority as estate administrator.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth families often manage aging-parent affairs across distance — the parent in a Perth suburb, an adult child carer in the same city but working full-time, and a named executor who may be a sibling in Melbourne or Sydney. WA’s probate process through the Supreme Court of Western Australia gives the executor formal authority to deal with the estate, but it doesn’t deliver them a tidy list of what’s leaking from the accounts. A prepared subscription inventory means the Perth executor can start cancelling on day one rather than waiting for a year of statements to arrive, and avoids the awkward situation of charges continuing to debit an account the bank has already been notified about.

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 organising affairs for an aging parent in Perth can register their first subscriptions module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your executor can find it — not passwords, not card numbers, and not the email accounts those subscriptions are tied to.