If you’ve read these seven blogs, you’ve quite familiar with estates and wills. You know what these concepts mean, and you realise that you need professional help. Especially if your estate is sizable. And if you have an ex-spouse and a current spouse, dependent children and step-children, dependent elderly parents – oh my goodness – what instructions do you want your executor to perform when you are no longer here? How do you want your estate to be divided?
ALSO READ : RIP Jay Pillay: Learning by Pretending to Die: So – What’s the cost of dying?
And if you are self-employed, running your own business? Well, your work has just got more complicated!
Your executor needs to know every aspect of your whole financial life. You could let her/him have this in the form of an excellent personal financial filing system. This means good records of everything you have, since you began accumulating wealth. This may cover a period of fifty years!
If a good filing system is not easy, can you imagine how handy LISTS will be? Place yourself in the shoes of your executor. If you had lists that told you all this (see the information below) – wouldn’t your job be relatively easy? You can’t close off what you don’t know about, right? Let’s get to that list of lists. Right now. Right here.
- SARS information: Taxpayer number, SARS paperwork.
- Bank accounts: Account numbers, names of banks.
- Motor car documents.
- Investment accounts: Account numbers, holding companies.
- Insurance policies: Policy numbers, holding companies.
- Store accounts: Account numbers, names of stores.
- Loan information (mortgage bond): loan account numbers, lending organisations. All house documents.
- Retirement/Pension funds: Names of companies, fund numbers.
- Share ownership information: Shareholder numbers, company names.
- Foreign assets.
Most estate planners recommend that you keep these lists with your will. And, say, every five years you update the lists.
In this way, the worst case your executor will face, is a list that is up to five years old. (To do this properly, every time you do something that relates to your long-term assets – like a new investment policy, or a new car – you revise the list.)
And every time a “life event” happens (like a divorce, a new baby, or the death of a potential heir) you will revise your will. You will, won’t you? (Oh no, you can’t be willy-nilly about this!)
How can you talk about wills, without mentioning organ donation, and leaving cash (or even property) to your favourite organisation? I’m glad you asked. In my final blog, I’m going to tie all this up by covering exactly these two points.
Jay Pillay’s first two critical decades were spent where his first decade began – in Pietermaritzburg. After studying at ML Sultan Technikon in Durban (anyone remember that place?), he then joined the sugar industry, working in Tongaat, Durban, and Xinavane – a sugar mill village 120km north of Maputo. Oh yes – there was a brief period of unfaithfulness, when he flirted with aluminium in Richard’s Bay. Upon retirement, he and his wife Dorothy – settled in Southport.
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