Investment Instructions for Your Partner: A Melbourne Parent’s Plan for Shares, ETFs and Crypto

You and your partner are raising kids in Melbourne. Between the two of you there’s a CommSec account, a couple of ETF holdings through a low-cost broker, a managed fund that’s been running since before the first child arrived, and — somewhere — a bit of crypto on an Australian exchange and maybe a hardware wallet in a drawer. If something happens to you, your partner needs to know what exists and where to look, fast, because there are dependants whose financial plan depends on those holdings not disappearing into the silence of a forgotten broker login.

The problem

Australian investment portfolios for parents are usually spread across at least three places: a CHESS-sponsored broker (identified by a HIN), an issuer-sponsored holding or two (identified by an SRN), a managed fund or micro-investing app, and — increasingly — a crypto exchange account or self-custody wallet. ASIC’s MoneySmart estate-planning guidance points out that assets your executor or surviving partner cannot identify are assets the estate effectively loses; the will cannot direct what no one knows about.

Crypto compounds the problem. ASIC’s MoneySmart crypto guidance is blunt: crypto assets sit outside the consumer protections that apply to regulated financial products, and lost keys mean lost coins with no recovery path. For a Melbourne family, that means a partner who doesn’t know an exchange account exists may never claim it, and one who knows a hardware wallet exists but has no plan around the keys still cannot access the holdings — but at least they can stop the estate paying a forensic firm to look for something that’s gone.

What the Digital Legacy Vault does

The Digital Legacy Vault is an asset-instruction register. The simplified version (built for individuals and families) records, per investment line: the broker or exchange name, your HIN or SRN or member/account identifier, the issuer or ticker, and the contact pathway your partner should use to make a claim. For crypto holdings, it records that a wallet or exchange account exists, which exchange or wallet type, and any non-sensitive identifier — so your partner knows the shape of what’s there.

The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your keys, not your seed 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 is not a financial product, not custody, and not advice) and outside AUSTRAC’s AML/CTF reporting obligations. It also keeps you in control of the keys themselves, which belong in whatever recovery arrangement you’ve chosen separately.

How it works

  1. You add each investment holding to your vault — broker or exchange, identifier (HIN, SRN, member number, exchange account email), ticker or fund name, and any notes about dividend reinvestment or auto-buy plans.
  2. You name your partner as the recipient for the investments module and they accept; the vault records their consent, consistent with Australian Privacy Principles on collecting personal information about third parties.
  3. For crypto, you record what exists and where (exchange name, wallet type, approximate purchase year) — and you separately note for your partner whether keys exist and where the recovery instructions live, without storing the keys themselves.
  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 too.
  5. Your partner contacts each broker, registry or exchange directly with the identifier and a death certificate. The vault accelerates the finding step; the provider runs its own deceased-estate process.

Why this matters in Melbourne

Melbourne households skew toward dual-income, dual-portfolio arrangements with kids in the picture — meaning two sets of broker accounts, two sets of super, often a managed fund opened when a child was born, and an increasing number of small crypto positions opened on Australian exchanges between 2017 and 2024. The estates that struggle most in Victoria are not the ones with complex assets; they’re the ones with scattered small assets the surviving partner never knew about. A clean inventory — what, where, who to call — is what turns a six-month broker search into a two-week claim, and lets your partner focus on the children rather than detective work.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when parents in Melbourne 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, recovery phrases, hardware wallet PINs, or exchange logins.