Investment Instructions for Your Adult Children: An Adelaide Plan for Shares, ETFs and Crypto You Hold Solo

You live in Adelaide. You’re managing your own affairs — no partner to cross-reference what you hold. Over the years you’ve accumulated a CHESS-sponsored share portfolio with one broker, an issuer-sponsored parcel from a long-ago float, an ETF account with a second broker, and a bit of crypto on an exchange (and maybe a hardware wallet in a drawer). Your adult children are the people you trust to sort it out, but right now they have no idea what exists, where it lives, or how to even start. The plan is to leave them an inventory they can act on — without ever handing over a password, a seed phrase, or a wallet PIN.

The problem

When a solo investor dies or loses capacity, Australian estates routinely lose track of what was held. There is no central registry of brokerage accounts, no national crypto ledger, and no way for an executor to query “what did Mum own?” ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on wills makes the point plainly: assets the executor cannot identify are assets the estate cannot claim. CHESS-sponsored holdings are tied to a HIN at one broker; issuer-sponsored shares sit under an SRN with the share registry; ETFs and managed funds live with whichever platform you opened. Crypto is worse — ASIC MoneySmart warns that crypto assets are largely unregulated, sit outside ordinary consumer protections, and that lost keys mean lost coins, full stop.

Your adult children don’t need your trading password. They need to know which brokers and exchanges you used, what your HIN and SRN numbers are, which registry (Computershare, MUFG, Automic) handles each holding, and — for crypto — which exchanges hold custodied coins versus which wallets you self-custody. Without that map, they spend months guessing, and small holdings get written off entirely.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what you own, where it lives, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per investment line: the broker or exchange name, your HIN or SRN or account identifier, the relevant share registry, the asset category (direct equities, ETF, managed fund, crypto, term deposit, bond), and any notes your children will need to chase it up.

The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your adult children can find it — not your keys, recovery phrases, or hardware wallet PINs. It also does not hold broker passwords, two-factor codes, or exchange API keys. For self-custodied crypto, the instructions are still useful even without keys: your children can verify what was held, rule out wasting estate funds searching for assets that are unrecoverable, and avoid being scammed by “recovery services”.

The boundary matters: the Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not a financial advice service. It’s an instructions register. That’s what keeps it outside the AFSL regime (Corporations Act Part 7.6) and outside AUSTRAC AML/CTF reporting — and it’s why it can be a simple subscription rather than a regulated product.

How it works

  1. You add each investment line to your vault — broker or exchange name, HIN or SRN or account identifier, share registry, and asset category.
  2. For crypto, you record what exists and where (exchange-custodied vs. self-custodied), and you flag explicitly whether keys are recoverable elsewhere or not. No keys go in the vault.
  3. You name your adult children as recipients for the investments module and they accept (the vault records their consent, in line with the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles, which govern personal information about both you and them).
  4. If a capacity event or death occurs, your children are notified per your release rules and see only the investments module — not your other modules unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your children take the inventory to each broker, registry, or exchange with the appropriate legal documents (probate, death certificate, attorney appointment). The vault accelerates the finding step. The institutions still run their own processes.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide investors tend to hold longer-running portfolios with mixed sponsorship — a parcel of bank shares from the 1990s demutualisations, ETFs added in the last decade, and a smaller crypto allocation picked up more recently. When a solo Adelaide investor dies without a clear inventory, the executor often discovers issuer-sponsored holdings only when a dividend statement arrives in the post months later, and crypto holdings only when an exchange sends an inactivity email. A clean, single-page instruction set — what exists, where, who to call — typically saves the family months of registry detective work and stops small holdings from being abandoned entirely.

Sources

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when the Digital Legacy Vault opens for Adelaide investors

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when solo adults in Adelaide can register their first investments module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your adult children can find it — not your broker passwords, not your seed phrases, not your hardware wallet PINs, and not your money.