Investment Instructions for Your Adult Children: A Melbourne Solo Adult’s Plan for Shares, ETFs and Crypto

You’re on your own in Melbourne, in your fifties or sixties, and over the years you’ve built up a mix of things — a CommSec or Pearler account with some direct shares, an ETF holding or two, a managed fund, and maybe some Bitcoin or Ethereum bought during one of the cycles. Your adult children know vaguely that “Mum has investments” or “Dad has some crypto”, but if something happened tomorrow they couldn’t tell you which exchange, which broker, or whether the wallet on the old laptop still matters. The plan is to leave them a clear inventory — what exists, where to look — without handing over a single password, seed phrase, or PIN.

The problem

Australian estates routinely lose track of investments that no one in the family knew about. There’s no central registry for crypto holdings, small broker accounts sit dormant, and ETF positions held directly through a share registry can be invisible to anyone but the holder. ASIC’s MoneySmart guidance on crypto-assets is blunt about the consequences: if access is lost, the holding is effectively lost, and there are limited consumer protections to fall back on. An executor cannot claim what they cannot prove existed.

Your adult children don’t need your CHESS-sponsored broker password or your hardware wallet PIN. They need to know: which broker holds your shares and what your HIN or SRN is, which ETFs you hold and through which platform, that a Ledger device exists and roughly what’s on it, and which exchange accounts are still active. Without that inventory, the first months after a death or a stroke go to forensic guesswork — and for crypto specifically, knowing what existed at least lets the family stop hunting and rule out wasting estate funds on a search that has no realistic chance of succeeding.

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: the issuer or platform name, the broker or exchange, the HIN/SRN or account identifier, the asset category (direct shares, ETF, managed fund, crypto holding, term deposit, bond), and any notes your children will need about where physical documents or hardware devices are kept.

The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your adult children can find it — not your keys, recovery phrases, hardware wallet PINs, exchange passwords, or broker logins. That boundary is the whole point. It keeps the vault outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6, outside AUSTRAC’s AML/CTF obligations, and outside the custody business entirely. It’s an instructions register, not a financial product, and not advice on what to buy, sell, or hold.

How it works

  1. You add each investment line to your vault — issuer, broker or exchange, account identifier (HIN, SRN, member number), and category.
  2. For crypto, you record what exists and where the device or wallet lives (the safe, the drawer, the lawyer’s office) — not the seed phrase, not the PIN.
  3. You name your adult children as recipients for the investments module and they accept (the vault records their consent, which matters under the Australian Privacy Principles because they are identifiable third parties).
  4. If something happens, your children are notified per your release rules and see only the investments instructions module — not your other modules unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your children take the inventory to your executor and solicitor. The executor contacts each broker, registry, and exchange directly with the account identifiers. The vault accelerates the finding step; the legal process is unchanged.

Why this matters in Melbourne

Melbourne has a deep retail investing culture — a long tail of self-directed CommSec, SelfWealth, Stake and Pearler accounts, plus one of the country’s higher concentrations of early crypto adoption through the 2017 and 2021 cycles. Solo adults in particular tend to hold the most fragmented portfolios: multiple brokers picked up over decades, ETF positions held directly with Computershare or Link, and crypto scattered across two or three exchanges plus a hardware wallet bought years ago. A clear instruction set — what exists, where, who to call — is often the difference between an executor finding everything in weeks rather than discovering a forgotten holding two years after probate closes.

Sources

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when the Digital Legacy Vault opens for Melbourne solo adults

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when individuals in Melbourne 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 exchange logins, and never your seed phrases or hardware wallet PINs.