It’s easy to stay focused on our day-to-day lives and not think about the future, especially if you have achieved the things you wanted out of your life like a great career, a nice home, and a lovely family! You should enjoy the fruits of your labours now, but it’s also sometimes necessary to consider what happens to your family in a future where you are no longer with them! We are all going to pass away eventually, so it’s really important to think about the fallout of your death for your loved ones, and what you can do to help them. One of the best things you can do is to be prepared with a will.
Things often do not go well for families whose chief wage earner and property owner passes away without writing one, which we will learn more about below. For now, we will simply state that it is truly in their best interests for you to take action now, and meet with an estate planning attorney to discuss and formulate your last will and testament! Life is fickle, and we never know what might happen next, so it really is better to have something in writing now, even if you are hale and hearty!
And now for a cautionary tale- what if you die without a will in Australia? If you die without having a will, it means you die intestate. This refers to the State Intestacy Law which will then determine how your estate will be distributed and managed.
So, if you don’t have a will prepared the following will take place upon your passing:
You will no longer have any say about who is going to benefit from the estate you left behind. An unpleasant example would be that your assets could be shared with relatives who you don’t care for, and who you would not wish to benefit from your largesse. To be perfectly blunt, there’s nothing you can do about it, you are dead and the dead don’t speak!
You also would have no say about who would be charged with the role of administering and making the final decisions about your estate. It might end up being your creepy younger brother who turned out to be a total jerk and you can’t do a thing about it!
Your estate could take a long period of time to settle, as much as a year or more. That’s time that the people who you might have wanted to benefit have to wait.
The legal costs for settling your estate would be significantly higher than if you had taken the time to write a will. That will come out of the amount your loved ones might have received.
It won’t matter how large or small it may be, your estate legally has to be administered and settled. If you don’t have an executor nominated in your will and you die intestate without having written one, the role would be delegated to your next of kin, generally, a person who the courts decide has the largest entitlement to your estate, and it may not be whom you wanted!
So, please write a will, your loved ones will appreciate it!
