Five Reasons to Write Your Will This Year, Not Next

Most Canadians who die without a will have one thing in common: they planned to write one eventually. The gap between intention and execution isn't laziness. It's the assumption that "eventually" is still years away.

It isn't always. And when a death happens intestate, the legal term for dying without a will, the consequences land hardest on the people you meant to protect.

Here's what the planning gap costs in concrete terms. In British Columbia, if you die without a will and leave a spouse and two children, your spouse gets the first $300,000 of the estate, then splits the remainder 50/50 with the kids. That sounds orderly until you realize your spouse now co-owns the house with your adult children, who may have their own financial pressures or marital complications. What looked like a family home becomes a negotiation, often forced into probate court because no one can agree on next steps. The average probate application in BC runs nine to twelve months if it's contested.

The estate you think you're leaving isn't the estate that arrives

Provincial intestacy rules operate on a formula, not on what you would have wanted. If you're in a common-law relationship in Ontario for three years but never married, your partner gets nothing under intestacy law, the entire estate goes to your children, or if you have none, to your parents or siblings. It doesn't matter that you built a life together. The law sees roommates. A will overrides that.

The same problem hits blended families harder. If you remarried and have kids from a prior marriage, intestacy splits your estate between your current spouse and all your children equally. That's rarely the structure anyone intended. The spouse who was relying on your half of the joint assets to stay in the house now owns a fraction of an estate being divided with stepchildren they may barely know. A $12,000 probate fight over $150,000 in assets is common.

Guardianship defaults to a judge if you don't name someone

If both parents of minor children die without naming a guardian, the court picks one. The assumption that your sister or your best friend will obviously step in is not legally binding. What actually happens is a hearing where a judge weighs the interest of any relative who petitions, and sometimes that's the aunt in Calgary your kids have met twice. The process drags for months. Kids end up in temporary care or with a relative you wouldn't have chosen while the adults argue in family court.

Digital assets and business interests vanish into legal limbo

You own a consulting business structured as a sole proprietorship. You die intestate. There is no automatic succession, no named executor empowered to wind it down or transfer clients. Contracts lapse. Receivables sit uncollected. Your spouse has no legal authority to access your business bank account without a grant of administration, which takes months. By the time they get it, half your client list has moved on.

Same problem with the cryptocurrency wallet or the cloud-hosted storage with ten years of family photos. No executor, no documented access credentials, no recovery. It just locks.

The $3,500 problem becomes a $15,000 problem

Dying without a will doesn't mean your estate avoids probate. It means probate gets harder and more expensive. Instead of submitting a will and an executor's application, your family has to apply for letters of administration, which requires a bond in many provinces and often sparks disputes over who should administer. Legal fees double. The timeline stretches. Executor's fees, in provinces where they're calculated as a percentage of estate value, apply the same whether there's a will or not, except now they're going to a court-appointed administrator instead of the person you trusted.

A basic will drafted by a BC lawyer costs between $300 and $800 depending on complexity. The difference between writing it and not writing it is the difference between your family spending one afternoon at a lawyer's office and your family spending a year in probate court. That math doesn't get better if you wait.