Online Account Instructions for Your Adult Children: A Brisbane Solo Adult’s Plan for the Email, Photos, and Logins You’d Otherwise Take With You

You’re on your own in Brisbane — single, divorced, or widowed — and your adult kids live their own lives in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, or interstate. Across the years you’ve accumulated a Gmail, an iCloud full of twenty years of photos, a Facebook, a couple of password managers you keep meaning to consolidate, a Qantas Frequent Flyer account, a Steam library, and a dozen others. If something happens to you tomorrow, your kids won’t know most of those accounts exist — let alone how to close them or rescue the photos. The plan is to leave them an inventory, without ever handing over a password.

The problem

When an Australian dies or loses capacity, their online life doesn’t pause. Inboxes keep receiving bills. Subscriptions keep charging the card. Photo libraries sit behind two-factor authentication that no living person can satisfy. Each provider (Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft) runs its own deceased-user process, and each one starts with the same question your kids cannot answer: which accounts did your parent actually have?

ASIC MoneySmart’s estate planning guidance is clear that a will deals with property and assets — it does not enumerate digital accounts, and executors are routinely left guessing. Meanwhile, the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles govern how personal information is handled, which means providers are (rightly) cautious about releasing access to anyone who can’t prove who they are and what they’re entitled to. Without an inventory and a pre-arranged recovery contact, your children may simply never see the photos again.

Your kids don’t need your passwords. They need to know which accounts exist, what the username or email address is on each, whether you set up Google’s Inactive Account Manager or Apple’s Legacy Contact, and what you’d like done with each account — memorialise, download and close, or leave alone.

What the Asset Instruction 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, the username or account email, whether a recovery or legacy contact has been configured at the provider, and your closure preference (memorialise, download-and-close, transfer where the provider permits, or leave). It does NOT hold your passwords, your recovery codes, your 2FA seeds, or your password manager master password. Your adult children see the inventory you’ve prepared for them, 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 under Corporations Act Part 7.6, and outside AUSTRAC reporting — and it’s also why it can be a simple subscription rather than a regulated product.

How it works

  1. You add each online account to your vault — provider, username or account email, and the closure preference you’d like your kids to follow.
  2. For the accounts that support it (Google, Apple, Facebook), you go to the provider directly and configure a legacy or recovery contact — usually one of your children. You record in the vault that you did so, and when.
  3. You name your adult children as recipients for the online accounts module and they accept (the vault records their consent under the Privacy Act framework for handling third-party personal information).
  4. If something happens, your children are notified per your release rules and see the online accounts inventory — provider, username, closure wish — without any credentials attached.
  5. They contact each provider directly using the provider’s deceased-user process, armed with the username and a death certificate. The vault accelerates the finding step, not the provider’s verification process.

Why this matters in Brisbane

Brisbane’s solo adults are often the family record-keepers — the parent holding twenty years of photos from school trips, weddings, and grandchildren, scattered across iCloud, Google Photos, and an old Dropbox. When those accounts go unenumerated, the photos are effectively gone: providers will not release content without proof, and without an inventory there’s no way to even begin a request. A short, current list of accounts and closure wishes is the difference between your adult children spending a weekend downloading the family archive and discovering, years later, that an account they never knew existed quietly deleted itself for inactivity.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when solo adults in Brisbane 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 recovery codes, and not your 2FA seeds.