What Happens if You Die Without a Will?

Leanne Kaufman joins us to explain how dying without a will can cause all sorts of issues — and why it rarely plays out the way families would want.

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My advice to everyone is it doesn’t matter what your age is. It doesn’t matter what your asset level is. You need a will. And the reason is because it’s not about you and, and it is about your estate, but it’s about your family and the people you’re leaving behind. If you don’t have a will, and you pass away, someone has to apply to the court to become the administrator of your estate. And so that’s a, you know, that’s an additional layer of process. Um, but it also, there’s a whole bunch of things that you can’t do, uh, as a result. So the legislation will determine who gets your assets. You don’t get to decide who gets your assets.

No money will be left to charity unless all of your beneficiaries come together and decide that that’s something they wanna do because the money’s now theirs. Um, there’s no planning for minors. So if anyone is not the age of majority yet, when they, um, become an inheritor, then they’ll get it all at the age of majority.

No ability to delay that in anyway. I mean, just a myriad of consequences and it’s, it’s just a bit of a mess and it’s so much easier to just go and get the will done.

Yeah, each of the provinces and territories has their intestacy laws and basically those are the laws that govern what happens when someone dies without a will. And the thing that the public doesn’t seem to understand is how rigid. Those laws are, I mean, it’s just done according to the formula. Your particular circumstances don’t influence how the money is distributed at all.

I think in Ontario, if someone passes away the first $350,000 goes to the spouse, and then the remaining amounts divided a third for the spouse, two thirds for the kids, et cetera. But to your point, that’s not always ideal. In fact, in many instances, we’d much rather the spouse gets the whole shebang.