Here is the fact that surprises almost everyone, including people who have already written a will: your will does not control everything you own.
Here is the fact that surprises almost everyone, including people who have already written a will: your will does not control everything you own.
Estate attorney Mary Beth Fanelli makes this point hard in Leaving a Legacy of Love. Any account with a named beneficiary or nominee, retirement funds, insurance policies, bank accounts with a designation, pays directly to the named person and bypasses the will entirely. The designation form you signed years ago, probably in five seconds at an account-opening desk, outranks the will you agonized over. Courts in multiple countries have enforced decades-old beneficiary forms over the clear written wishes of the deceased, because the form is a contract with the institution and the will is not.
Which means your estate plan has a second layer that most people never audit, and it quietly rots.
The divorced-spouse trap. You named your spouse on your pension and life insurance, as you should have. Then the marriage ended. Unless you filed new forms, the ex-spouse is still the named beneficiary, and in many jurisdictions the institution must pay them, will or no will, new family or no new family. Fanelli's files, and every probate lawyer's files, hold versions of this story where a decade-estranged ex collects everything while the current spouse and children collect legal fees.
The outdated-nominee trap. The gentler, more common version. You opened the account at 24 and named your mother, or a sibling, because that is who mattered then. Fifteen years, one marriage, and three children later, the form still says what it said at 24. The institution will follow the form. Your family will discover this at the worst possible week of their lives.
Neither trap comes from bad planning. Both come from unreviewed planning. The fix is not a lawyer. It is a calendar entry.
For Ugandan readers, the designation layer is wider than most people realize. Walk through these five:
NSSF. Your NSSF Uganda benefits go to the nominees on your member record. Many members filled this at their first formal job and never touched it again. If your nominee record still names your father from 2009 and you married in 2015, you have a problem you cannot feel yet.
SACCO accounts. Every SACCO membership form asked for a next of kin. That entry drives who the SACCO deals with when you die. Old employer SACCOs you half-forgot still hold your savings, and your old answer.
Bank accounts. Your bank's next-of-kin or nominee record determines who they will talk to, and depending on the product, who receives funds outside probate.
Mobile money. Your MTN MoMo or Airtel Money registration includes a next of kin captured during SIM and wallet registration. Balances are small until they are not, and for many families the wallet is the most active account the deceased had.
Insurance policies. Life and personal-accident policies pay the named beneficiary directly. Employer group-life schemes have their own nomination forms sitting in an HR file.
The structure is universal. If you are reading this outside Uganda, your list is your pension, your provident fund, your insurance, your brokerage, and any bank product with a payable-on-death designation.
Pick a fixed date you cannot forget, your birthday works, and run this four-step loop.
Step 1: List every account. Every institution that holds money with your name on it: pension, SACCOs, banks, mobile wallets, insurers, employer schemes, investment platforms.
Step 2: Check every named person. For each account, confirm who is currently named. Do not trust memory, memory is exactly what this audit exists to correct. Call, visit, or log in and read the actual record.
Step 3: Fix mismatches immediately. Every institution has a change-of-nominee form. File it the same week, not "when I'm next in town." An identified mismatch you have not fixed is worse than an unknown one: now it is a known problem you left for your family.
Step 4: Tell the named people. A beneficiary who does not know they are a beneficiary may never claim. Unclaimed benefits sit in institutional limbo for years. One sentence is enough: "You are my nominee on my NSSF account, here is the membership number, keep it somewhere safe."
Use this table. Ten lines covers most people; add rows if you need them.
| # | Institution | Account/Policy No. | Named person | Still correct? | Fixed on | Person told? | |---|-------------|--------------------|--------------|----------------|----------|--------------| | 1 | NSSF | | | | | | | 2 | SACCO 1 | | | | | | | 3 | SACCO 2 | | | | | | | 4 | Bank account 1 | | | | | | | 5 | Bank account 2 | | | | | | | 6 | MTN MoMo | | | | | | | 7 | Airtel Money | | | | | | | 8 | Life insurance | | | | | | | 9 | Employer group life / benefits | | | | | | | 10 | Other (investment, ROSCA, land agreement witnesses) | | | | | |
Keep the completed table with your will, and give a copy to one trusted person. On its own, this table is also the asset inventory your family will desperately need, so the hour pays twice.
The yearly audit is the floor. Five events demand an immediate one, within 30 days:
Each of these changes either who you would name or who is available to be named. The 30-day rule exists because these are exactly the seasons when paperwork feels least urgent and matters most. A man who divorces in January and dies in June with the old forms in place has, legally speaking, chosen his ex as his beneficiary. The law will not read his intentions. It will read the form.
Do not schedule the full audit yet. Do one line of it today: check your single largest designation, for most employed Ugandans that is NSSF, and confirm who is named. If it is right, you have earned some peace. If it is wrong, you have just done the highest-value hour of estate planning available to you at any price. Then put the full one-hour audit on your calendar, on your birthday, repeating yearly.