The Biggest Estate Planning Mistakes

Over half of Canadian adults don’t have a will. Aaron Hector joined us on the latest episode of The Wealthy Barber Podcast to explain why that’s a problem—and what else people get wrong with estate planning.

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Walk us through some of the other mistakes you see most frequently in the estate planning end of things.

Not having a will. It’s basic. It’s 50, 50 something percent of Canadian adults don’t have a will. Um, that is a disaster waiting to happen. Uh, I’m constantly harping on people who don’t have wills to get wills. Um, I, I think a lot of people also think it’s not important for younger people to have wills. But it’s still very important at a young age. Not only that, but health directives, like it’s a different name for these documents in every province in Alberta. It’s a personal directive. In Ontario, I believe it’s, um, power of attorney for personal care, but a lot of times people don’t have those documents in place either.

So if you’re, if you have an incident and you’re in the hospital and you, you’re in a coma or who knows, you can’t make your own personal decisions, who can assist in that. So those are important, whether you’re 20 or 60 or 80, um, and they’re not always in place. Um, so like it’s, it’s just a matter of, you know, getting the foundational stuff in place and then, uh, sure you review it, you know, every, every so often.

Like it, you know, every five years or so. Dust it off, give it a read. Um, does it still make sense? Uh, you know, something that I see quite often is an executor is named who is older. Um, and there might be provisions for minors where a trust is gonna need management for maybe, maybe it’s like 10, 15 years until the money is distributed.

Is that person you’ve named gonna be capable to do that function for the next 15 years or so? Like, maybe you need to think about who, who you’re naming in these capacities.

I just said in the video that when you’re reviewing your will, make sure you’re reviewing your executor decision as well. Because relationships change, that person moves away, as you say, their age may come back into play, all of these types of things. So couldn’t agree with you more on all of that. You’ve gotta be very careful that you’re thinking this through, and I think going back to your net worth statement, start of your process, I always advocate for having a comprehensive net worth statement with your will.

That’s pointing the executor to, where do I find all this? What am I dealing with? It puts it all in one spot. It can really ease their stress and make their job a lot easier going forward.

A lot of people also, like their will might say, I may leave a memorandum of wishes, um, with, you know, kind of a, a list of instructions, but then they never actually make the memorandum of wishes either.

That sounds like something I would do actually that. That sounds like something I would do.