Estate Planning, Wills, POA & Beneficiaries

What most Canadians get wrong

Because death is the one event no one gets to practise, its mistakes are made by almost everyone, and they are made only once. They tend to cluster into a recognizable set:

1. They have no will, or a badly outdated one. Dying without a will hands the distribution of everything you own to a rigid government formula that may bear no resemblance to your wishes. And a will written decades ago, can be nearly as harmful, naming people who have died, ignoring assets acquired since, and missing every planning opportunity of the intervening years.
2. They let beneficiary designations go stale. The named beneficiary on a retirement account or insurance policy generally overrides the will entirely. Forgotten designations (an ex-spouse never removed, a deceased relative never updated) routinely send large sums to exactly the wrong person, with no way to fix it after death.
3. They fall into the joint-ownership trap. Adding an adult child as a joint owner to “avoid probate” is a common source of estate disaster.
4. They ignore the deemed disposition entirely. They picture assets passing untouched to their heirs and never plan for the bill that lands on the estate, the most common shock an executor faces.
5. They forget the cottage will be taxed. The family assumes the beloved cottage will just “stay in the family,” never realizing that decades of growth come due at death, often with no cash to pay it.
6. They have no plan for incapacity. Estate planning is not only about death. A power of attorney, naming someone to act if you become unable to, is just as vital, and its absence can force a family into a costly, painful court process at a moment of crisis.
7. They leave the retirement account to the estate by accident. Failing to name a spouse directly as beneficiary of a registered account can make the spousal rollover harder to reach, adding paperwork and probate exposure, and can lose it entirely if the will sends the estate to someone else, turning a smooth deferral into a large, immediate, and entirely avoidable tax bill.
8. They ignore their U.S. exposure. Snowbirds and cross-border families assume the American tax system has nothing to do with them, then leave behind a U.S.-situated condo or portfolio that drags their estate into a foreign tax regime no one planned for.
9. They wait until it’s too late. Estate planning is endlessly easy to postpone, because its deadline is unknown and unwelcome to contemplate. Then one spring, without warning, the chance to plan is gone.
10. They confuse a will with a plan. Having a will feels like being finished, and so the deeper work (the deemed disposition, the cottage, the registered accounts, the cross-border exposure) never happens. A will decides who gets what. It does not, on its own, decide how much tax is paid getting there. The two are different jobs, and most people do only the first.
11. They never coordinate the pieces. One person drew up the will. Someone at the bank filled out the beneficiary forms. A third person set up the business, and the American condo was bought with no advice at all. Each step made sense on its own. Together, they can contradict each other, and the conflict waits to surface at death. Estate planning works only when the pieces are looked at together, by someone who can see the entire picture.
12. They assume it is only for the wealthy. Estate planning carries an air of mansions and trust funds that scares ordinary families away from it, yet it is precisely the ordinary family, with a home, a cottage, a retirement account, and no cushion to absorb a surprise, that a tangled estate hurts most. The wealthy can absorb mistakes here. Most families cannot, which is why the planning matters most to them.

Read that list again and notice what nearly every item has in common: not one of them is a failure of intelligence or effort. They are failures of attention and timing: sensible people, busy with living, who never turned to face a subject that felt distant and uncomfortable until it abruptly wasn’t. That is oddly hopeful, because it means the fix is not difficult or expensive or reserved for the wealthy. It is available to anyone willing to spend a few hours, while they are well, doing the one thing all of these mistakes leave out: looking ahead in time.