Investment Instructions for Your Adult Children: A Brisbane Solo Adult’s Inventory of Shares, ETFs and Crypto

You’re in Brisbane, you’re managing your own affairs without a spouse or partner, and your investments are scattered — a CHESS-sponsored brokerage account, an ETF position with a different broker, a managed fund from a decade ago you keep meaning to consolidate, maybe a term deposit, and some crypto on an exchange (or in a hardware wallet in a drawer). Your adult children are the people who’ll eventually need to act on your behalf — during a capacity event or after death. The plan is to leave them a clear inventory: what exists, where to find it, and who to contact — without ever handing over a password or a seed phrase.

The problem

When a solo investor dies or loses capacity in Australia, the executor or attorney can only claim what they can prove exists. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on estate planning is clear that assets not identified in the estate paperwork can be missed entirely, and small broker accounts, neobank deposits and crypto holdings are the categories most often lost — there is no central registry of any of them. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on crypto-assets reinforces the harder problem: if the keys are gone, the holding is gone, and there is no consumer protection scheme to recover it.

Your adult children don’t need your trading password. They need to know: which broker holds your shares (and the HIN or SRN that identifies the holding), which ETFs and managed funds you hold and through whom, whether you hold crypto and on which exchange or in which hardware wallet, and which professional (accountant, adviser) already knows your portfolio. Without that inventory, the first months of administering your affairs go to forensic searching — and crypto, in particular, simply vanishes when no one knew it existed.

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 investment line: the issuer or broker name, the account or holder identifier (HIN, SRN, member number, exchange username — not password), the asset category, and any notes about how your children should contact the institution.

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 does not hold trading passwords, MyGov codes, exchange API keys, or seed phrases. For crypto specifically, the instruction set tells your children that a holding exists and where the keys are physically stored (e.g. “Ledger device in the safe, recovery card with the solicitor”) so they can act on real information rather than guess.

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 under Corporations Act Part 7.6 and outside AUSTRAC AML/CTF reporting — and it’s also 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, account identifier (HIN, SRN, exchange username), asset category, and a free-text note for your children.
  2. For crypto, you record what exists and where the keys physically live — never the keys themselves. The vault refuses fields that would capture seed phrases or PINs.
  3. You name your adult children as the recipients for the investments module and they accept (the vault records their consent under the Australian Privacy Principles).
  4. If something happens, 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 contact each broker, registry or exchange directly, with the identifier and the relevant legal documents (grant of probate, enduring power of attorney). The vault accelerates the finding step; the institution still runs its own process.

Why this matters in Brisbane

Brisbane investors tend to hold a wider spread of small accounts than Sydney or Melbourne portfolios — a legacy of demutualisation share parcels, employee schemes from interstate employers, ETF accounts opened through different mobile brokers, and a higher-than-average proportion of self-directed crypto wallets. A solo adult without a partner has no second person who already knows the shape of the portfolio. Without an inventory, your adult children may spend months identifying holdings through bank statements and tax records, and may never identify crypto holdings at all. A clear instruction set — what exists, where, who to call — typically saves a Brisbane family weeks of searching and rules out wasting estate funds chasing holdings that no longer exist.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when individual adults in Brisbane 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 keys, not your seed phrases, not your hardware wallet PINs, and not your money.