If someone dies without making a will, their estate is divided according to the intestacy rules. These are fixed by law, and they apply regardless of what the person might have wanted.
For many people, the outcome is not what they would have chosen.
How the intestacy rules work
If you are married or in a civil partnership and you have children, your spouse or civil partner receives a fixed sum from your estate, set by statute. Anything above that is split, with half going to your spouse or civil partner and the other half passing to your children.
That sounds reasonable in principle. In practice it can create real difficulties.
Your spouse may not be left with enough
The most common problem is the family home. Depending on the value of your estate, the fixed sum your spouse receives may not be enough to cover the value of the house. Sorting that out afterwards is complicated, and it has to be done at a point when the person best placed to explain what they intended is no longer there.
The result can be a surviving spouse left in a difficult financial position, and a degree of conflict between them and your children.
Blended families face the greatest risk
If your children are young and from your current relationship, the intestacy rules may cause few problems in practice.
The picture changes considerably where there are older children, particularly from a previous relationship. You may end up with a surviving spouse arguing they should receive more, and children from an earlier family arguing for a substantial share of their own. That kind of dispute can result in expensive litigation, funded out of the very estate you wanted to pass on.
You lose all say in who benefits
Without a will, you cannot direct which of your children receive what, and you cannot make different provision for different parts of your family.
Equally, you cannot say who should not benefit. There may be a family member you have reason not to provide for. There may be a child whose partner you would rather kept some distance from your money. The intestacy rules take no account of any of that.
Do you always need one?
If your estate is straightforward, and you are content for everything to pass to your spouse, you may be able to manage without a will. But that is a narrower set of circumstances than most people assume, and it is worth checking rather than assuming.
It is easier than people expect
Making a will is not difficult and it does not take long. What it takes is a bit of thought about who you want to benefit and in what proportions.
That thought is far better done now, calmly, than left to your family to work out afterwards.
Resources
7 Dangers Executors Need to Know
