Estate planning tools get chosen the way clothes get chosen: by fashion. A cousin in Texas mentions his living trust, a YouTube advisor calls wills obsolete, and suddenly a salaried father in Kampala with one plot and...
Estate planning tools get chosen the way clothes get chosen: by fashion. A cousin in Texas mentions his living trust, a YouTube advisor calls wills obsolete, and suddenly a salaried father in Kampala with one plot and two children is asking a lawyer to price a trust he does not need, while the will he does need remains unwritten.
Tools do not care about fashion. They solve specific problems, and the right question is never "what do sophisticated people use?" It is "what problem does my situation actually have?" There are three tools on the table: the will, the trust, and the written family agreement. This piece explains what each one is actually for, where each one is the wrong answer, and then matches them to five common family situations, including the honest verdicts for readers in Uganda and the diaspora.
Start with the tool that has no exemptions. A will is the legal document in which you say who gets what, who is in charge of making it happen, and who raises your minor children. It requires a sound mind, two witnesses, and an afternoon.
Estate attorney Suren Adams, in Leaving a Legacy Instead of a Mess, gives the plainest account of what happens without one: if you do not name people in writing, "the loudest, bossiest family member" decides. Not the wisest relative. Not the one you trusted. The loudest one, in the vacuum you left. And behind the loudest relative stands the state, because dying intestate means your property is distributed by statutory formula, a formula that has never met your family, does not know that one brother is estranged, that one child has special needs, or that your widow was the co-builder of everything.
The will's honest limits: it does nothing until you die, it controls only assets without their own beneficiary nominations (your pension and insurance follow their forms, not your will), and in most jurisdictions it must pass through a court process, probate or its local equivalent, before assets move. In Uganda that means the executor applies for probate, and the process is public and takes time. Those limits are real, and none of them argues against having a will. They argue for a current one, with current beneficiary forms alongside it.
Cost matters here too: a simple valid will is one of the cheapest legal documents you will ever create. The gap between what a will costs and what intestacy costs a family, in money, months, and relationships, is the widest cost-benefit spread in this entire field.
Verdict: universal. Young or old, rich or renting, married or single. If you have a child or an asset, you have a will-shaped problem.
A trust is an arrangement in which you hand assets to a trustee, who holds and manages them under written rules for your beneficiaries. Because the trust, not you, owns the assets, they can bypass probate entirely, and because the rules are yours, the trust can do things a will cannot: pay out in stages, hold money for a child until 30, support a disabled dependent for life, keep the farm intact across a generation.
In the United States and the United Kingdom, trusts earn their keep against two specific problems. First, probate avoidance: in many US states probate is slow, public, and expensive enough that routing the family home around it through a living trust is standard middle-class planning. Second, staging and control: Adams's own practice uses incentive and staged-distribution trusts to release inheritances at 25, 30, and 35, her reasoning being that an heir who wastes the first tranche still has two more chances to get it right. Add estate tax planning for larger US and UK estates, and the trust is a genuinely load-bearing tool in those systems.
Now the honest transfer test: does your situation contain the problems the trust solves? For most Ugandan families, mostly no. Uganda has no estate tax, so the tax-shelter motive, the engine behind a great deal of trust marketing, simply does not apply. Probate in Uganda is a burden, but a well-prepared estate with a valid will, an able executor, and clean titles navigates it, and the local trust industry, trustee services, trust-literate courts, affordable administration, is thin compared to London or New York. A trust drafted in Kampala to imitate Delaware is expensive scaffolding around a building that did not need it. The exceptions are real but narrow: significant assets held abroad, a dependent who will never be able to manage money, substantial business wealth needing multi-generational governance, or diaspora families whose assets sit in trust-friendly jurisdictions anyway.
Verdict: situational. Strong for US/UK estates, diaspora holdings, and special-needs or staging problems that must be legally enforced. Usually unnecessary in Uganda, where the will plus the third tool covers the same ground at a tenth of the cost.
Here is the tool fashion ignores, because no one sells it: the family agreement, a written, signed, witnessed document in which living family members agree on how family wealth will be handled. It is not a will, because it operates while you are alive. It is not a trust, because there is no trustee and often no transfer. It is closer to a constitution, and for many African families it does more day-to-day work than either legal instrument.
Concrete forms it takes:
Why write any of this down, when the family "already knows"? James W. Lea, who spent decades advising family businesses and wrote Keeping It in the Family, gives the warning this piece hangs on: the unwritten plan is a jellyfish. It has no spine, no fixed shape, and it changes form with whoever is describing it. Dad's remembered promise becomes three incompatible promises the week after the funeral, each sincerely believed by the child it favors. Writing is what gives a plan a skeleton. Signatures are what give it witnesses. The family agreement will rarely be enforced in a courtroom, and honesty requires saying so: its power is social, not judicial. But most family disputes never reach a courtroom anyway; they are fought in living rooms, at burials, and in clan meetings, and in those venues a signed, witnessed document is decisive artillery.
Verdict: underused everywhere, and especially valuable where formal legal infrastructure is expensive or slow. Costs a family meeting and some paper.
| Situation | Will | Trust | Family agreement | First move | |---|---|---|---|---| | Young parents, few assets | Essential now, mainly to name guardians and direct insurance | Skip, unless a policy payout to minors needs a trustee structure | Light: agree guardianship and education intentions with the named guardian | Write the will and name the guardian this month | | Landowner, family land | Essential: who gets which plot, by title reference, plus written burial wishes | Rarely, unless land must be held intact across generations and cannot be subdivided | Strong: a signed land-use and no-sale agreement among heirs prevents the classic subdivide-and-liquidate spiral | Regularize titles, then will, then land agreement | | Business owner | Essential, but a will alone cannot run a company | Consider where wealth is large or spans borders | The core tool: succession memorandum naming the successor, timeline, and compensation for non-operators, witnessed by the council | Write the succession memorandum before the will | | Blended family | Essential and urgent: intestacy formulas and loud relatives treat second spouses and stepchildren brutally | Useful even in Uganda-scale estates if enforceable protection for a second spouse or specific children is needed | Handle with care: written clarity helps, but negotiate with a neutral third party present | Will first, drafted by a lawyer, not a template | | Diaspora, assets in two countries | Essential in each jurisdiction: coordinated wills covering each country's assets | Often yes, for the foreign assets, where trusts are native tools | Strong: a written agreement on remittances, the village project, and who manages home-country property ends the ambiguity that eats diaspora families | Coordinated wills, then a trust review in the host country |
Read the table and one pattern jumps out: the will appears in every row, the trust in two and a half, and the family agreement in four. That is roughly the correct global weighting, and it is nearly the opposite of how the internet ranks these tools.
Identify your row in the table above, then do its "first move" within thirty days. For most readers that means one thing: draft the will, because every other tool in this piece stacks on top of it, and none of them can substitute for it.
This piece did its job if you stop asking which estate planning tool is impressive and start asking which row you are in, and if at least one unwritten family promise in your life gets a spine, a date, and a signature this month.