Subscription and Recurring-Payment Instructions for Your Adult Children: A Perth Plan for Quietly Closing the Tabs

You live in Perth, you’re managing your own affairs, and your kids are grown. Between Netflix, the gym in Subiaco, two cloud storage plans, the professional body membership you renew every July, a couple of monthly donations, and the streaming service you forgot you signed up for during lockdown — there’s probably a dozen recurring charges hitting your card each month. The plan is to leave your adult children a clean list of what’s running, which card it comes off, and how to cancel each one — without handing them your logins.

The problem

Recurring charges don’t stop when you do. They keep auto-billing the card on file for months, sometimes years, until someone notices the line items and works through cancellations one provider at a time. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance is clear that the executor’s job is to identify and wind up the deceased person’s financial commitments — but it can’t tell the executor what the commitments are. That’s on you to prepare.

For a solo adult in Perth, the problem compounds. There’s no partner who knows the household budget. Your adult children probably don’t know which gym you go to, let alone whether you’ve prepaid an annual membership at the Australian Institute of Company Directors or set up a monthly tithe to a local charity. Estates routinely lose four-figure sums to subscriptions that auto-renewed for a year after death because no one knew to call the provider. The bank can stop the card, eventually — but cancelling the underlying contracts, claiming refunds where they’re available, and notifying the providers properly is a paperwork job that needs an inventory to start from.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register: you record what recurring payments exist, where they bill from, and who you’ve nominated to act on the instructions. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per subscription: the provider name, what the subscription is for, the billing frequency and approximate amount, which card or account it’s debited from, the account or membership identifier, and a short note on how to cancel (web form, phone number, written notice period). It does NOT hold your passwords, your card numbers, or your login credentials. 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 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 recurring charge to your vault — provider, what it’s for, billing amount and frequency, the card it bills against (last four digits only, not the full number), and the cancellation route.
  2. You name your adult children (one or more) as the recipients for the subscriptions module and they accept (the vault records their consent).
  3. You review the list when your card is reissued or when you cancel something. The vault keeps the inventory current with periodic prompts.
  4. If something happens — a capacity event or death — your nominated children are notified per your release rules and see only the subscriptions instructions module, not your other modules unless you’ve released them too.
  5. Your children work through the list provider by provider, cancelling on your behalf with the identifiers you’ve supplied. The vault accelerates the finding step. The card issuer and the providers do the actual closing.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth households often run a mix of national and local subscriptions — east-coast streaming services alongside a Cottesloe surf club membership, a Joondalup gym, a Subiaco yoga studio, or a WA-specific professional body. Local providers usually don’t appear on the bank’s auto-suggested cancellation lists, which means executors miss them and the charges keep running. A solo Perth adult who leaves a clear, current inventory typically saves the estate hundreds to thousands of dollars in charges that would otherwise accrue between death and the moment someone finally reads the bank statements line by line.

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 subscriptions module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what recurring charges exist and how your adult children can cancel them — not your passwords, not your card numbers, and not your money.