Subscription and Recurring Payment Instructions for Your Sibling: A Perth Carer’s Plan for Stopping the Quiet Drain

You’re in Perth, you’ve taken on most of the practical work of looking after an aging parent, and your sibling is the next-of-kin you’ve nominated to step in if you can’t. Between Mum’s streaming services, the gym she stopped using two years ago, three professional memberships, two charity monthly donations, the iPad cloud storage, the security monitoring, and the magazine that still arrives — nobody has a complete list. The plan is to record every recurring charge, the card or account it hits, and how to cancel each one, so your sibling isn’t piecing it together from twelve months of bank statements.

The problem

Subscriptions are the quiet drain on an estate. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance is clear that an executor’s job includes identifying and stopping ongoing financial commitments — but it doesn’t tell you how to find them, because no central register exists. Recurring charges keep hitting the card or the bank account every month after a death or incapacity event, sometimes for a year or more, until somebody works backwards through statements and rings each provider one at a time.

For an aging parent’s affairs, the problem is worse. The subscriptions accumulated over fifteen years across half a dozen email addresses. Some are billed annually, so they don’t even show up until the renewal hits. Some are tied to a credit card that’s been replaced twice. Your sibling, stepping in cold, has no way to know what Mum was paying for unless someone wrote it down. Estates routinely lose four-figure sums to forgotten subscriptions before the executor catches up.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what exists, where it’s billed from, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per recurring charge: the service name, the billing frequency, the approximate amount, the payment method it’s linked to (e.g. “Mum’s CBA Visa ending 4421” — not the card number), the account email used to sign up, and a short cancellation note (phone number, online cancellation path, or “requires written notice 30 days”). It does NOT hold the login passwords, the card numbers, or any credential. Your sibling sees the inventory you’ve prepared, 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 (Corporations Act Part 7.6) and outside AUSTRAC reporting — and it’s why it can be a straightforward subscription rather than a regulated product.

How it works

  1. You sit down once (ideally with your parent, or with twelve months of their bank statements) and add each recurring charge to the vault — service name, billing frequency, amount, payment method, cancellation path.
  2. You name your sibling as the recipient for the subscriptions module and they accept; the vault records their consent under the Australian Privacy Principles.
  3. When a charge changes — new card, cancelled service, new subscription — you update that single entry. The vault keeps a current list, not a stale one.
  4. If something happens to you or to your parent, your sibling is notified per your release rules and sees only the subscriptions module — not your other modules unless you’ve released them.
  5. Your sibling works down the list, cancelling each service directly with the provider. The vault accelerates the finding step; the cancellation itself stays with the provider.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth families dealing with an aging parent are often split across the country — one sibling in Perth doing the day-to-day, another in Melbourne or overseas doing the paperwork. When the carer in Perth becomes unavailable (illness, travel, or the parent moves into care), the interstate sibling inherits a problem they have no local context for. A clear, current list of what’s being charged, to which card, and how to stop it removes weeks of remote detective work and stops the estate bleeding money on services nobody is using.

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 and families in Perth can register their first subscriptions module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your sibling can find it — not passwords, not card numbers, and not the money itself.