On your wedding day, somewhere between the vows and the cake, the law quietly rewrote a document you have probably never read: the default plan for everything you own. Before the wedding, if something happened to you, your estate pointed at your parents and your siblings. After...
On your wedding day, somewhere between the vows and the cake, the law quietly rewrote a document you have probably never read: the default plan for everything you own. Before the wedding, if something happened to you, your estate pointed at your parents and your siblings. After it, the law routes through your spouse. You changed your legal center of gravity in an afternoon, and almost nobody tells newlyweds that this happened, or that the new default is still nowhere close to what you would actually choose.
This article is about closing that gap in year one, while the conversation is cheap. It has three moves: understand the new default, write the mirror wills, and sweep the old names off your accounts. None of them takes more than an afternoon. All of them are easier now than they will ever be again.
The corpus has walked through Uganda's Succession Act, plainly, and it is worth reading in full, because the pattern it shows repeats in some form across most jurisdictions: when you die without a valid will, a formula written by Parliament distributes your property, and marriage is the event that redraws the formula.
Under the amended Ugandan Act, a person who dies intestate with a spouse and children leaves the children 75 percent, the spouse 20 percent, dependent relatives 4 percent, and the customary heir 1 percent. No children yet, as is true for most couples in year one? The spouse's share rises to 50 percent, with a dependent relative taking 49. The family's principal residence sits outside the formula entirely, preserved for the surviving spouse and children.
Read those numbers as a newlywed and two things should stand out. First, the law now sees your spouse, which is a real protection that did not exist the day before your wedding. Second, the law's version of your marriage is not your version. Twenty percent to the person you promised everything to, with the rest distributed by a formula that has never met either of you, is nobody's actual intention. And the protection only reaches a spouse the law recognizes. The corpus's worked example in the Succession Act piece includes exactly this fracture: a marriage never formalized, so the widow's entire position, her share and her home, goes into litigation with the in-laws. If your marriage is customary and not yet registered, that registration is estate planning, and it belongs on this year's list, not someday's.
The default, in other words, improved on your wedding day. It did not become good. The exit from the default costs almost nothing, which brings us to the second move.
A valid will, in Uganda and in many jurisdictions with similar inheritance law, does not require a lawyer or money. It requires writing, your signature, and two witnesses who are not beneficiaries. That is the whole machine, and The Will-Writing Session walks through the afternoon step by step.
For a married couple, the natural form is a pair of mirror wills: two separate documents, each naming the other as primary beneficiary, each naming the same fallback if you die together, each written in the same sitting. One evening, two pages, two witnesses each. When children arrive, you will update them to name a guardian, and that update will take another evening, because you will be amending a document that exists instead of drafting one in grief.
Yes, the conversation is uncomfortable. You are three months into building a life and one of you says, so, if I die. Have it anyway, and have it now, for a reason that is purely practical: this is the cheapest this conversation will ever be. Right now your estate is simple, your family trees have not yet entangled, there are no children whose guardianship could be disputed, and nobody is sick. Every year you wait adds assets, claimants, and emotional weight. The couple that writes mirror wills in year one spends an awkward evening. The couple that waits can spend years in the queue the corpus documents: letters of administration, court backlogs, relatives with opinions, a widow proving her marriage to a magistrate. Uncomfortable and cheap now, or catastrophic and expensive later. That is the entire trade.
Here is the trap that catches even couples who write wills: several of your most valuable assets will not follow the will at all. The Names on Your Accounts Outrank Your Will explains why, and The Beneficiary Sweep turns the fix into a checklist. Bank next-of-kin records, insurance beneficiary designations, pension and NSSF nominations, SACCO nominee forms, employer death-in-service records: each is a separate instruction held by a separate institution, and the institution acts on the form on file, not on your will.
Now ask the newlywed question: who is on those forms today? Almost certainly the people who were closest to you when you opened each account. Your mother, named when you got your first job. Your father, on the bank form from university. Possibly an ex, on an insurance policy from another life. You did not update those forms on your wedding day, because nobody does. Which means that right now, months into your marriage, the payout path for your most liquid assets still runs around your spouse, not to them.
So do the sweep as a couple, once, in your first year: list every institution holding a designation for either of you, check each name on file, and update the stale ones. The sweep article gives you the counter phrase and the document list. Budget one afternoon plus a follow-up visit or two. Then repeat it annually, and after every birth, because forms rot quietly and life does not send reminders.
One belief will try to stop all three moves, and it deserves to be named and retired in your twenties: the idea that writing a will invites death. The corpus's myth audit takes it apart across three fronts, but the single most useful fact for a young couple is Gallup's age gradient: only 20 percent of adults under 30 hold a will, against 76 percent of those over 65. People do not write wills when writing becomes safe. They write when denial becomes unaffordable, usually decades late.
You have the chance to be the exception at the age when it matters most. The same person who insures a car without believing the premium causes the crash can write a will without believing the paper summons anything. Death was never scheduled by paperwork. The only thing the paperwork decides is whether your spouse inherits your voice or a percentage table, and you already know which one you promised.
Book one evening on the calendar for the mirror wills: two pages each, signed, two non-beneficiary witnesses each, the corpus's will-writing session open on the table as the guide. Before that evening arrives, start the beneficiary list together: every bank, wallet, insurer, pension, SACCO, and employer, and the name each one currently holds. You rewrote your legal life once this year already, at the altar. This week you make the paperwork agree.