Investment Instructions for Your Adult Children: A Perth Plan for Shares, ETFs and Crypto You Hold on Your Own

You’re a Perth adult planning your own affairs — single, divorced, or simply un-partnered — and your investments are scattered across a CHESS-sponsored broker, an ETF account you opened during lockdown, a managed fund from years ago, and a bit of crypto on an exchange and a hardware wallet. Your adult children are the people who will sort this out when you can’t. The plan is to leave them a clear list of what exists and where to find it, so they aren’t guessing at your kitchen table after the funeral.

The problem

ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance is direct: when assets aren’t documented, the executor’s job becomes detective work, and small holdings routinely fall through the cracks because no one knew they existed. For shares and ETFs there is at least a paper trail — CHESS holding statements, registry letters, dividend notices — but only if your children know which broker, which registry, and which HIN or SRN to quote. For crypto, ASIC’s consumer guidance is blunter: there is no central registry, no consumer protection scheme, and lost keys mean lost coins. Australian estates lose track of crypto holdings every week because the executor never knew the wallet existed in the first place.

For a solo adult, this risk concentrates. There is no spouse who watched you set up the Binance account or who remembers the name of your broker. If your adult children don’t know what to look for, they can’t claim it — and for crypto, they can’t even confirm whether searching is worth the estate’s time and money.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what you own, where it can be found, and who you’ve nominated to receive the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per investment line: the issuer or ticker, the broker or exchange where it’s held, the account identifier (HIN, SRN, member number, exchange username), and any notes your children will need — for example, “hardware wallet is in the safe; the seed phrase is held by the solicitor under separate cover.”

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 deliberate. It keeps the Digital Legacy Vault outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6 (no financial product, no custody, no advice) and outside AUSTRAC’s AML/CTF reporting obligations. It’s an instructions register, not a wallet and not a brokerage.

How it works

  1. You add each investment line to the vault — issuer or ticker, broker or exchange, HIN/SRN/account ID, and a free-text note about where supporting documents live (safe, solicitor, filing cabinet).
  2. You add each crypto holding the same way — exchange name and username, or “hardware wallet, Ledger Nano, stored at [location].” No keys, no seed phrases, no PINs go in the vault.
  3. You name your adult children as the recipients for the investments module and they accept. The vault records their consent in line with the Australian Privacy Principles, because their contact details are personal information.
  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.
  5. Your children take the inventory to your executor or solicitor. The broker, registry and exchange each run their own deceased-estate process. The vault accelerates the finding step; it does not move assets and does not replace probate.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth’s mining-cycle wealth pattern means a lot of solo adults here hold a wider-than-average mix: direct ASX shares from employee schemes, ETFs bought through a discount broker, super-sized term deposits, and crypto picked up in the 2020–2021 wave. Time zones make it worse — your adult children may live in Sydney, Melbourne, or overseas, and every hour spent guessing at which Perth-based broker held what is an hour they spend on the phone in the middle of their night. A clear instruction set lets them call the right registry on the first try and rules out wild-goose chases for crypto that was sold years ago.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when solo adults in Perth 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 recovery phrases, not your hardware wallet PINs, and not your money.