Every unplanned estate has a co-heir nobody named. Before your children receive anything, fees, taxes, delays, and disputes take their share, and they always collect first.
Every unplanned estate has a co-heir nobody named. Before your children receive anything, fees, taxes, delays, and disputes take their share, and they always collect first.
The warning comes from Earl R. Eastman in Advanced Estate Planning: "Fees, taxes and disputes inherit first from unplanned estates." The word "first" is the sharp part. Leakage is not a discount applied at the end of probate. It is a creditor standing at the front of the queue. Court fees, administrator costs, advertising requirements, valuation charges, and the long tax of delay all get paid out of the estate before a single heir does. In an unplanned Ugandan estate, the family often spends months, sometimes years, funding a process from money that was supposed to fund their lives, while land sits untransferred and accounts sit frozen.
Why does an annual review beat this? Because leakage feeds on staleness, and staleness accumulates quietly. The research on unplanned estates keeps circling the same pattern: most of what an estate loses was preventable with paperwork that existed but had gone out of date, or paperwork that was always intended and never done. The beneficiary never updated after a remarriage. The land purchase completed but the title transfer did not. The will written a decade ago that now contradicts how the family actually lives, which is exactly the kind of contradiction that turns siblings into litigants. Each of these is small in the year it happens and expensive in the year you die. A yearly review is the only instrument that catches them while they are still small, because it is the only instrument that runs on a schedule instead of a crisis.
Here is the habit, on a yearly cadence:
LegacyPot runs this through the analytics module. The yearly nudge reads: "Every unplanned estate has a silent co-heir: fees, delays and disputes. A yearly review keeps your family first in line." The app keeps your asset and document status in one view, surfaces the gaps as a leakage risk picture, and books the annual review so the co-heir never gets a quiet year to grow.
This week, write down the one asset in your name that would transfer worst if you died this year, and make it the first item of your first review.