Online Account Instructions for Your Adult Children: An Adelaide Plan for the Email, Photos, and Logins You Leave Behind

You live in Adelaide, you’re handling your own affairs, and your adult kids are the ones who will eventually sort through your digital life. Between your main email, two cloud photo libraries, a password manager you set up years ago, a Facebook account, an Instagram, a couple of loyalty programs, and the streaming logins — there’s probably twenty-plus accounts they don’t even know exist. The plan is to leave them a clean inventory: which providers, which usernames, which account is the recovery contact for which — without ever handing over a password.

The problem

When someone dies in Australia, their online accounts don’t appear on a list anywhere. There’s no central registry. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance focuses on wills and financial assets, and a will rarely enumerates email addresses, cloud accounts, or photo libraries. Each provider — Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft — runs its own deceased-user process, and every one of them requires your children to first know the account exists and know the username or email tied to it.

Without that, the photos stay locked in iCloud. The decades of email — including the receipts, the warranty records, the correspondence with the accountant — stay unreachable. The Facebook account sits live for years because no one knew to memorialise it. Your adult children don’t need your passwords (most providers won’t accept them anyway; they require formal deceased-user requests). They need to know which accounts exist, what username identifies each one, and which email is the recovery address for the others.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what you own, 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, your username or account identifier, what recovery contact is set up on it, and your preference for what should happen to the account (memorialise, close, download and archive). It does NOT hold your passwords, your 2FA seeds, your recovery codes, or your password manager master password. Your adult children see the inventory you 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 your account inventory stays personal information governed by the Privacy Act, not regulated financial data.

How it works

  1. You add each online account to your vault — provider, username or email, account type (primary email, cloud storage, social, loyalty, password manager), and what recovery contact is set up.
  2. You record your closure preference per account: memorialise, request closure, request data download, or leave to recipient’s discretion.
  3. You name your adult children (one or several) as recipients for the online accounts module and they accept — the vault records their consent under the Privacy Act framework.
  4. If something happens, your children are notified per your release rules and see the online accounts inventory — provider names, usernames, recovery setup, your closure wishes.
  5. They contact each provider directly using that provider’s deceased-user process. The vault accelerates the enumeration step — the part where families currently fail — not the provider’s verification.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide families often live geographically apart from each other — adult children in Melbourne, Sydney, or overseas while a parent stays in the family home. When something happens, the children are flying in, sorting a house they don’t live in, and trying to remember what email address their parent has used since 2009. They won’t find it by searching the desk. Providers’ deceased-user processes typically require account identifiers up front, and without them the requests stall. A clear instruction set prepared in advance is often the only way the photo libraries, the email archive, and the social accounts get recovered at all rather than sitting locked indefinitely.

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Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when individuals in Adelaide can register their first online accounts module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your adult children can find it — not your passwords, not your 2FA codes, and not your password manager master key.