Investment Instructions for Your Partner: A Perth Parent’s Plan for Shares, ETFs and Crypto the Kids Are Counting On

You’re a parent in Perth with dependants at home. Between you and your partner there’s a CHESS-sponsored brokerage account, an ETF portfolio that drip-feeds into the kids’ future, a small managed fund left over from before the children arrived, and — somewhere — a crypto wallet from 2021 that nobody has logged into since. If something happens to you, your partner needs to know what exists and where to find it, so the money you’ve been building for the children doesn’t quietly disappear.

The problem

Australian estates routinely lose track of investment holdings because there is no single registry. Direct shareholdings sit with CHESS sponsors and share registries under a HIN or SRN your partner has likely never seen. ETF and managed fund positions are scattered across brokers and platforms. Crypto sits on exchanges or in self-custody wallets that leave no paper trail at all — ASIC MoneySmart’s crypto guidance is blunt that crypto sits outside the consumer protections that apply to regulated financial products, and that lost access generally means lost asset.

ASIC MoneySmart’s estate planning guidance is clear that beneficiaries and executors can only deal with assets they know about. A will doesn’t help if your partner doesn’t know the broker exists, doesn’t have the HIN, and can’t tell the registry which Smith family they belong to. For parents of dependants, that gap isn’t abstract — it’s school fees, the mortgage buffer, the money earmarked for the kids’ first car.

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 line: the issuer or fund name, the broker or exchange that holds it, the HIN, SRN or account identifier, and the contact path your partner would use to make a claim. For crypto specifically, it records that the holding exists, which exchange or wallet type holds it, and where the family should look — so your partner can verify the holding and decide whether to pursue it.

The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your keys, recovery phrases, or hardware wallet PINs. It does not hold broker passwords, exchange logins, two-factor codes, or any credential. Your partner sees only the inventory you have prepared for them, and only when you have released it.

The boundary matters: the Digital Legacy Vault is not a financial product, not a custody service, and not an advice service. That keeps it outside the AFSL regime (Corporations Act Part 7.6) and outside AUSTRAC AML/CTF reporting — which is also why it can be a simple subscription rather than a regulated product.

How it works

  1. You add each investment to your vault — issuer or fund, broker or exchange, HIN/SRN/account identifier, and a short note on the registry or platform contact.
  2. For crypto, you record the exchange name or wallet type and where the family should look — without recording keys, seeds, or PINs.
  3. You name your partner as the recipient for the investments module and they accept (the vault records their consent under Australian Privacy Principle rules on collecting third-party information).
  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 identifiers, the death certificate, and probate where required. The vault accelerates the finding step — it does not bypass the institution’s own claim process.

Why this matters in Perth

Perth households tend to hold a wider-than-average spread of investments — mining-linked direct shareholdings inherited from family, ETF portfolios run through east-coast brokers, and a long tail of crypto positions opened during the 2020–2021 cycle. The two-hour time difference with Sydney and Melbourne means estate administration calls to east-coast registries and brokers chew through whole mornings. A clear instruction set — every HIN, every account number, every exchange name — typically saves a Perth family weeks of registry searches and reduces the chance that a holding the kids are depending on simply never surfaces.

Sources

Join the waitlist

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

We’re opening waitlist access in tranches. Sign up to be notified when parents of dependants in Perth can register their first investments module. The Digital Legacy Vault holds instructions about what exists and how your partner can find it — not your broker passwords, not your exchange logins, and not your crypto keys or seed phrases.