Investment Instructions for Your Partner: An Adelaide Parent’s Plan for Shares, ETFs and Crypto

You’re raising kids in Adelaide, you and your partner both work, and somewhere between school pickups and the mortgage you’ve quietly built a portfolio — a CommSec account, an ETF or two through a micro-investing app, a self-managed bit of crypto you bought in 2021, maybe a small parcel of shares from a long-ago employee scheme. If something happened to you tomorrow, could your partner list it all? Could they prove the crypto exists without burning through estate funds trying to find it? This door is about leaving them an instruction set that does the job — without ever handing over a password, a seed phrase, or a hardware wallet PIN.

The problem

Australian investment portfolios are scattered across brokers, registries, micro-investing apps, and exchanges that didn’t exist five years ago. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate planning guidance is clear that assets which aren’t documented routinely fall through estates — executors can only claim what they can prove existed. ASIC’s MoneySmart crypto guidance goes further: crypto holdings sit outside the consumer protection regime that covers regulated financial products, and lost keys mean lost coins, full stop. There is no central registry, no “forgot password” link, and no trustee to call.

For an Adelaide parent with dependants, the practical risk is twofold. First, your partner spends weeks of grief-time playing detective across brokers and exchanges. Second, the kids’ future depends on assets your partner doesn’t know to claim. A HIN on a CHESS-sponsored holding is meaningless to someone who doesn’t know the broker. A wallet address is meaningless without context. And searching for crypto you might or might not still hold can quietly drain the estate.

What the Asset Instruction Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an instructions register: you record what you own, where to find it, and who you’ve nominated to receive those instructions. For investments, the simplified version records per holding: the issuer or fund name, the broker or exchange, your HIN or SRN or account identifier, the registry contact, and any notes your partner will need (employee scheme details, custodian arrangements, the fact that a particular crypto wallet was emptied in 2023).

The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your keys, not your recovery phrases, not your hardware wallet PINs, and not your exchange logins. That boundary is deliberate. It keeps the vault outside the AFSL regime under Corporations Act Part 7.6 (it’s not a financial product, custody service, or advice service) and outside AUSTRAC’s AML/CTF reporting obligations. It also matches ASIC MoneySmart’s crypto warning: there is no consumer protection that will recover lost keys, so the right thing for a family is to know exactly what existed, where, and to make informed decisions about pursuit.

How it works

  1. You add each investment line to your vault — broker or exchange, account identifier (HIN, SRN, member number, or wallet address), and a plain-language note about the holding.
  2. For crypto, you record what exists and where (exchange account, hardware wallet kept in the home safe, paper backup at the bank) — never the keys themselves.
  3. You name your partner as the recipient for the investments module. They accept and the vault records consent, consistent with Australian Privacy Principle obligations on personal information about third parties.
  4. If something happens, your partner is notified per your release rules and sees only the investments module — not your other modules unless you’ve released them.
  5. Your partner uses the inventory to contact each broker, registry, or exchange directly with the account identifier and a death certificate. For any crypto where keys were never recoverable, they have written confirmation of the loss and can stop searching.

Why this matters in Adelaide

Adelaide families tend to hold investments that have accumulated quietly over long careers — a CommSec or NABtrade account from the early 2000s, an employee share scheme from a previous job interstate, a few thousand in ETFs through a micro-investing app, and crypto bought during the 2021 wave and largely ignored since. The South Australian probate process doesn’t reach what the executor can’t identify. A clear inventory means your partner walks into the first meeting with the estate solicitor already knowing the portfolio, not discovering it.

Sources

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when the Digital Legacy Vault opens for Adelaide parents

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when parents in Adelaide can register their first investments module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your keys, your recovery phrases, or your hardware wallet PINs.