When there is no will
Dying without a will does not mean your estate goes nowhere. It means someone else decides, using rules you did not choose.
There is a common belief that a will is for people with a great deal to leave behind. In practice, the opposite is often true. The smaller and less liquid the estate, the more damage an unclear succession can do to the people who depend on it.
When a person dies without a valid will, the distribution of their estate falls to be determined by law rather than by intention. The rules are general by design. They cannot know which child was being educated, which relative contributed to the house, or which business needed a single decision-maker to survive the transition.
The cost is usually delay
The most common harm is not injustice in the final outcome. It is the months or years spent reaching one. During that period the estate is frozen in ways that are rarely visible in advance: accounts inaccessible, property that cannot be dealt with, a business without authority to act.
What planning actually involves
Legacy planning is often reduced to the drafting of a single document. The document matters, but it is the last step. The work before it is more mundane and more useful:
- Establishing what is actually owned, and in what capacity
- Confirming that documentation matches reality
- Deciding who should hold authority, and making that appointment properly
- Telling the people who will have to act where everything is
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