It wasn’t until my wife and I had our first child that we turned our minds to wills. This was notwithstanding the fact that I had been through law school, been “called” as a lawyer, and practiced for a number of years.
For me, it was one thing to fail to make proper arrangements between myself and my wife but it was another entirely to fail to do so with a young child. Practicing in wills and estates and handling estate litigation files, I firmly believed, as I continue to, that proper estate planning is just another aspect of being a responsible, diligent parent. Estate litigation is a booming practice, and not one you want your family involved in at the best of times.
Without a will, your assets are divvied up according to a government scheme, one that you may not agree with. You best protect your loved ones and the assets which you worked so hard to accumulate during your lifetime by having a valid will and reviewing it on a periodic basis to ensure that it reflects your current wishes.
Perhaps one of the reasons why I hadn’t attended to a will previously is, quite frankly, I wasn’t worth much money. I reasoned, why would I care when there wasn’t much to divide up?
There were two specific reasons why this objection was outweighed after the birth of our daughter. First, it allowed us to set up a trust for our daughter, which would allow us to leave our estate to her and ensure that she was properly cared for but to make certain that the funds would be overseen by a “trustee”, in our case a family member, to ensure she wasn’t provided with a whack of cash at a young age (in case she thought that a Ferrari was preferable to the school bus).
Second, we could appoint guardians, in the event that both my wife and I passed away. This is a difficult, but extremely important decision.
There are other steps that my wife and I took in conjunction with drafting our Wills, as a part of our overall estate plan. First, we ensured that our home was in joint names, which ensured that the other would receive it in the event that one of us passed away. We updated the beneficiary designations on our RRSPs and life insurance policies to ensure that it was each other that we had appointed.
In our case we also drafted two separate documents. Enduring Powers of Attorneys allowed us to appoint someone to make financial decisions for each of us once we lost the ability to make decisions on our own. We also executed Representation Agreements, appointing each other to make personal, mainly health-related decisions, after we lost the ability to make decisions on our own.
Finally, my wife and I prepared a list of our assets, which we update from time to time. This can be very helpful for the person that administers your estate and prevents them from having to rifle through your mail or e-mail inbox (if they can find the password) to get your account statements. If you have a safety deposit box or safe at home, you should provide directions on how to access them.
None of the steps suggested above is overly complicated or expensive or time-consuming, even with a lawyer. They form just one of the many steps that my wife and I took as new parents (including abandoning both our night life as well as sleeping in!) and ultimately provided some reassurance that we were doing our best to safeguard our new bundle of love.
For more information on this topic please contact:
Michael Sinclair
Lawyer
msinclair@kzellaw.com
msinclair@kzellaw.com
