You wrote the will. You signed the powers of attorney. You did the hard thing, probably years ago, and you have earned the feeling of a job finished.
You wrote the will. You signed the powers of attorney. You did the hard thing, probably years ago, and you have earned the feeling of a job finished.
Here is the uncomfortable truth this article exists to deliver: a will written at 45 is often a bad will by 70. Not because the lawyer failed you. Because you kept living. The children who needed guardians now have children of their own. The plot you carefully allocated was sold to fund a business. The brother you named as executor has buried two of his own friends this year and tires by mid-afternoon. The document still says what you meant then. It no longer says what you mean now, and the law will enforce the old meaning without asking.
If you are in the handover decade described in The Handover Decade, this is the maintenance discipline that keeps phase one true for the other nine years. Documents are not a monument you build once. They are a fence you walk annually, checking for the posts that have quietly rotted.
A will is a photograph of your intentions on one particular day. Everything in it, the people, the assets, the amounts, the named roles, was accurate at the moment of signing and started drifting the moment you left the office.
The corpus's research thread on failed transfers keeps finding the same pattern: the estates that collapse into dispute are rarely the ones with no documents. They are the ones with stale documents, where the paper contradicts the life, and every heir gets to argue about which version the elder really meant. No Surprises in the Will makes the case that surprise is the accelerant of family conflict. An outdated will is a surprise you scheduled for your own funeral.
The fix is not another heroic drafting session. It is a rhythm: a short list of trigger events that force an immediate review, plus one annual read-through that catches everything the triggers missed.
Some events change your estate the day they happen, whether or not you touch the paperwork. Put this list somewhere you will see it, and treat any one of these as an appointment with your documents within thirty days:
None of these reviews takes long. Most end with "still correct, no change," and that answer, written down with a date, is itself valuable evidence that your document reflects a maintained intention rather than an abandoned one.
Triggers catch the loud changes. The annual read-through catches the quiet ones.
Once a year, on a fixed date, sit down with your will and read it aloud, slowly, alone or with your spouse. Not skim. Read. You are checking three things: are these still the people, are these still the assets, are these still my reasons. The corpus's ninety-minute Will-Writing Session is the session you run once; this is that session maintained, not repeated. You are not redrafting every year. Most years you will change nothing, and the read-through will cost you twenty minutes. But the year something has drifted, this is the twenty minutes that catches it while you can still fix it with a codicil or a fresh signature instead of leaving your children to litigate it.
A Written Plan, Revised Every Year makes the wider argument: a plan is only as alive as its last revision date. Attach the read-through to something fixed, your birthday week, the family's annual meeting, the first Sunday of a chosen month, so the calendar does the remembering.
Now the part most elders miss entirely. Several of your most valuable assets will ignore your will completely. Bank next-of-kin records, pension nominations, insurance beneficiaries, SACCO nominee forms: as The Names on Your Accounts Outrank Your Will explains, the institution acts on the form it holds, and that form may be twenty years old.
These designations were usually filled in once, on the day the account was opened, and they preserve that day's relationships forever: the parent who has since died, the sibling now estranged, the spouse from a previous chapter. The Beneficiary Sweep is the corpus's one-afternoon fix, and the Annual Next-of-Kin Audit is its yearly repetition. Fold it into the same date as the will read-through: one afternoon, every institution, every name checked against your current intentions. A perfect will behind a stale nomination is a beautiful letter that never gets delivered.
Finally, the roles. You named an executor, and perhaps guardians and attorneys, when everyone involved was twenty years younger. Ask three questions about each named person, honestly, this year and every year:
If any answer is no, name the replacement now, in writing, while it is a calm decision instead of a courtroom question.
Open your will this week and read it once, aloud, with a pen in hand. Note every name that has aged out, every asset that has moved, every trigger event from the list above that has happened since the signing date. Then book two appointments: one with your institutions for a beneficiary sweep, and one with your executor for the question you have not asked them in years. Twenty minutes of reading now, or years of dispute later. The document is waiting either way.