Author: admin

The Estate Planning Risk Nobody Measures

admin Estate Planning , , , ,
Two people at a desk reviewing financial documents together, with a pen, phone and tablet nearby

How Much Estate Planning Risk Can Your Family Absorb?

There’s a moment in every new client meeting where the conversation turns to risk. How would you feel if this dropped fifteen percent in a quarter? Twenty-five? What would keep you up at night?

I spent years working alongside financial planners, so I heard a version of that conversation more times than I can count. It’s a good conversation. The client thinks about it properly, because a good planner asks in a way that makes them think about it. The answer gets written down and built around, and it gets looked at again every year to see if anything’s changed.

That part of the work is done right. You find out what someone’s willing to put up with, you find out what they could actually survive, you measure both against what they say they want, and you keep adjusting until those three things line up. Nobody builds an investment portfolio without doing it.

Then the conversation gets to the estate, and it’s two questions. Do you have a will? Do you have a power of attorney? Yes and yes, tick, tick, next section. Two of the biggest decisions a person will ever make, getting less attention than a fund switch. That’s estate planning risk, and almost nobody measures it.

Who actually feels it

In the financial planning world, here’s what makes a risk tolerance assessment work, and it’s so obvious nobody verbalizes it. The person answering the questions is the person who has to live through the answer.

If you tell me you can handle a thirty percent drawdown, you’re the one opening the statement. You’re the one sitting with it at your kitchen table. That’s what makes your answer worth anything. You’re not guessing at how somebody else might cope, you’re telling me about your own experience of something you’ve either felt before or can imagine feeling.

Estate planning pulls that apart.

You answer the questions. Your executor gets the consequences. So does your spouse, so do your kids, so does your business partner if you’ve got one. None of them filled anything out. Nobody asked what they could handle or whether they’d ever handled anything like it. They inherit a risk position you picked for them, and they find out what you picked when you’re no longer around to explain yourself.

So the real question was never how much risk you’re comfortable with. It’s how much risk you’re comfortable handing to your daughter.

I’ve never heard anyone ask it that way. When I started asking it that way, things got real for those doing the planning and the answers were completely different.

Three things worth measuring

We’ve already got the framework. We just point it at the investment portfolio and stop there. Here’s how it looks for estate planning.

Tolerance. How much mess are you willing to leave behind? Almost nobody’s been asked. Ask it and the answer, obviously, is of course not. Then you walk through what their current setup would actually produce and the two answers don’t match at all. They weren’t being careless. They’d just never seen what their own plan would do.

Estate capacity. This is the one that matters most and I’ve almost never seen anyone assess it. I want to be careful with the word, because in our world “capacity” usually means mental capacity, whether someone can sign a document, when a power of attorney kicks in. That’s a different conversation entirely. Estate capacity is about the estate itself and the people involved. Is there cash to pay the tax bill on the final return, or does something have to be sold in a hurry to find it? Is your executor someone with the time, the skill, the health and the standing in the family to do this? Will your family still be speaking to each other after they disagree about the house?

None of that’s about you. Estate capacity belongs to the people you leave behind, and you’re usually the last person who can see it clearly.

Required risk. Does your plan actually produce what you say you want? Take a business owner who wants one of his three kids to take over the company and the other two treated fairly. That isn’t a wish, it’s a construction project. He needs a valuation, money to fund a buyout, an agreement his kids have actually read, and probably a policy to make the numbers work. If none of that exists, he isn’t taking a small risk on the outcome. There’s no version of events where he gets what he wants. Wanting something and paying for it aren’t the same thing.

WHAT ESTATE CAPACITY ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

Desmond was 61 when he died and his file was in good shape. Current will, current beneficiaries, a portfolio he’d built with his advisor to a moderate risk profile over twenty years and reviewed every spring. What nobody had ever looked at was whether his estate could handle anything going wrong. Almost everything he owned was in a rental property and an RRSP. Between the deemed disposition on his final return and the RRSP collapsing into a single year of income, his estate owed a tax bill it had no cash to pay. His daughter was the executor. She put the rental on the market in February, in a slow month, and it sold for about seventy thousand less than it would’ve brought the previous spring. Desmond spent twenty years staying away from anything volatile. The volatility found his estate anyway, and his daughter was the one left to deal with it.

The combination that does the damage

If you take one thing away from this, consider this pairing.

High tolerance sitting next to low estate capacity is behind nearly every estate disaster I’ve worked on or watched from a distance. The person isn’t worried. They’ve got a will, they signed it a while back, and they figure everyone will work it out. Meanwhile the people who have to work it out have no cash, an executor who’s never done this before, and a brother and sister who weren’t getting along before there was money involved.

Tolerance and estate capacity are both easy to miss on their own. Someone who isn’t worried just looks like someone who isn’t worried, and nobody’s checked what their estate could handle, so there’s nothing to contradict them. Put the two together and you can see it right away.

I keep running into one version of this in particular. Someone who wouldn’t go near an emerging markets fund, who moved everything into GICs at 58 because the swings bothered her, who wants to talk through sequence of returns risk before she takes out a single dollar, and yet her estate’s sitting there completely exposed. She has no idea. Nobody’s ever mentioned it, because the person who handles her portfolio and the person who drew up her will have never spoken to each other.

Three questions you can ask yourself

You don’t need a planner for this. You need a bit of quiet time and a willingness to answer honestly, and “honestly” is the hard part.

What are you actually prepared to leave behind? Not what you’re hoping for. What you could live with if it went badly. A few weeks of delay, fine. Some confusion, probably survivable. Where does it stop being fine? Ask most people and they’ll say they’re fine with a bit of delay. Show them what a bit of delay actually looks like and they stop saying that.

What can your people absorb? This one’s barely about you at all. Can anyone get to cash quickly, or is it all tied up in property? And if your registered accounts pay straight out to the people you named, is there anything left in the estate to cover the tax bill they trigger? Does the person you named know you named them, and could they do it while they’re grieving, working, and maybe living three provinces away? If your family had to make one hard decision together with nothing from you to guide them, how would that go? You already know.

Does your plan produce what you want? If you want a particular outcome, something has to make it happen. A beneficiary designation beats your will, so when those two disagree, the designation wins and what you wanted in your will loses. If you want everything split evenly and the biggest thing you own is a house, somebody’s got to buy somebody out, and that takes money that might not be there. Your intentions don’t carry themselves out.

Most people have never asked themselves any of those three questions. They have a will, and they figure the will covers it.

I built The Inherited Risk™ after watching too many families find out the hard way what nobody had asked. It walks you through your own tolerance, what your estate could actually absorb, and whether what you’ve built delivers what you say you want. Then it shows you where you’re exposed and what to do about each one.

Explore The Inherited Risk™

This part’s about people, not paperwork

Documents are easy to review. You can hold them, date them, tick them off. Capacity is about the people around you, which is why nobody looks at it and why it’s the part that decides everything.

Your executor’s capacity is their time, their competence, their health, and where they stand with everybody else in the family. Your estate’s capacity is whether things can turn into cash without losing money on the way. Your family’s capacity is whether they can disagree in a lawyer’s office and still show up at Christmas.

None of that shows up in a will, and all of it shows up in what actually happens.

THE PART SHE COULDN’T HAVE KNOWN

Kateryna’s mother had a good will. It was clear, it was current, and the family got along, which everyone assumes is the hard part. What nobody had thought about was that her mother had been running the household on her own for eleven years. The utilities and the house insurance came out of an account that froze the day she died, and the house sat empty for six weeks while waiting for probate. The insurer’s vacancy clause had already voided the coverage at thirty days. Nothing happened to that house, and Kateryna calls it the luckiest six weeks of her life. Her mother had a good will. Nobody had ever asked what her estate could withstand.

I’ve watched a family come through losing a parent still intact, because there was money available and instructions that made sense. I’ve watched families with a great deal more money come apart completely, because there was neither. It was almost never about how much they had. It was about whether anyone had ever asked what their people and the estate could handle.

Here’s the part I want you to remember. You can’t change what your family’s capable of, but you do get to decide how much you ask of them. Cash can be created. An executor can be chosen because they’re capable, not because they were born first. Instructions can be written down while you’re still here to write them. Every one of those decisions takes weight off the people who come after you, and every one of them is available to you today.

That’s what the assessment is for. Not so you’ll worry about it. So you can go and fix it.

Visit our services page to see how we can help.

Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:

Prefer a podcast? Listen here!

Please send us your questions or share your comments.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

The Biggest Lie About Being an Executor

admin Executor and Estate Administration , , , ,
Man holding estate documents standing before a house that shifts from spring blossoms to winter snow, symbolizing how long an executor timeline actually runs

Two Years, Not Two Months: What Executors Don’t Expect

When Kaveh’s father died, the lawyer read through the will and confirmed what Kaveh already half expected. His father had named him executor. His sister looked across the table and said, “Well, you’re better with paperwork than I am.”

Kaveh didn’t ask for the role and neither did she. Their father had made that decision years earlier, on his own, when he wrote the will. But Kaveh had a choice about whether to accept it, and once he did, he pictured a few months of forms, maybe a trip to the bank, a lawyer’s office visit or two. He figured he’d have the estate wrapped up by the time the leaves turned that fall.

Eighteen months later, he was still waiting on a letter from the CRA.

Kaveh isn’t unusual. Most people who agree to be an executor have never done it before, and almost nothing in the way the role gets offered prepares them for how long it actually takes. “Can you look after things” sounds like a weekend project. It’s closer to a part-time job that runs for a year, sometimes two or more, with long stretches where the only thing to do is wait.

Why “a few months” is almost never right

A simple, uncontested estate with a clear will, cooperative beneficiaries, and no property to sell can sometimes close in under a year. That’s the fast case. For most estates, twelve to eighteen months is a more honest estimate, and complicated ones, foreign assets, a business, a disputed will, a property that won’t sell, can stretch to two or three years. Sometimes even longer!

The reason has nothing to do with how hard the executor works. It has to do with how many separate government and institutional processes have to run their course, mostly one after another rather than all at once, before an estate can legally close.

A snapshot of the calendar

Weeks 1 to 8: getting the will into probate. Before an executor can do much of anything, banks and land registries usually want proof of legal authority. In Alberta, that’s a Grant of Probate from the Surrogate Court. Other provinces call it something else; a Certificate of Appointment of Estate Trustee in Ontario, for example, but the function is the same everywhere: the court confirming the executor is who they say they are. Filing the application itself can take a few weeks to prepare properly. Court processing on top of that typically runs six to eight weeks for a clean, uncomplicated application, though busier courts in bigger cities regularly take four to six months longer.

Months 2 to 6: the busiest stretch.  Executors don’t wait for probate to start working. Securing the estate’s assets, locking up a house, insuring valuables, safeguarding accounts, has to happen right away, before any grant is issued. Beneficiaries are also often notified before probate is granted, since notice requirements are usually built into the application itself. Once probate is granted, the executor gains full authority to open estate accounts, deal directly with financial institutions, and move ahead on locating and valuing assets and settling debts. This is usually the busiest period, and also the one people expect the whole process to look like. It doesn’t stay this way.

Around month 6 to 12: the final tax return and the waiting begins. The deceased’s terminal tax return has to be filed, generally by April 30 of the following year or six months after death, whichever is later. Once that return is assessed and the Notice of Assessment arrives, the executor can apply to the CRA for a Clearance Certificate. This is where most timelines run into trouble.

Months 6 to 12+ on top of everything else: the CRA Clearance Certificate. The certificate can’t even be requested until the Notice of Assessment is in hand, so this step doesn’t start until the tax filing above is fully completed. From there, the CRA’s own published standard is 120 days, about four months, to issue it once a complete request is received. In practice, that four-month clock only starts once every return has been filed, assessed, and any balance paid, and missing documents or an audit add time on top of it. According to the CRA website, even the standard itself only gets met about 80% of the time, so that means 20% of the applications, complete and clean or not, take longer than four months. The estate legally cannot close, and in most cases the executor cannot distribute the remaining assets, until this certificate is in hand. An executor who distributes early can become personally liable for any tax the CRA later finds owing.

Along the way: property, and the beneficiaries who are waiting. If the estate includes a house or vacation property, selling it adds its own timeline: listing, offers, closing, none of which happens on the executor’s schedule. Many provinces also require executors to wait, often around six months from probate, before final distribution, to give anyone with a claim against the estate time to come forward. Executors who distribute early to keep beneficiaries happy take on that risk personally.

When Kaveh Called the CRA

Seventeen months in, Kaveh called the CRA to check on his clearance certificate request. He’d filed it nine months earlier, once the terminal tax return was finally assessed, and assumed it was close by then. The agent told him the file was still in queue, and that a missing signature page on one of the original submissions had reset part of the clock. He resubmitted, and waited several more months. His sister asked him, more than once, why it was taking so long. He didn’t have a good answer, because nobody had told him what “long” actually meant when he said yes.

What actually causes the delays

A few things show up again and again:

  • Incomplete or unassessed tax filings when the clearance certificate request goes in, which stalls it before the CRA’s own clock even starts
  • Property that takes longer to sell than expected, or that beneficiaries disagree about keeping versus selling
  • Missing or hard-to-locate beneficiaries, especially in blended families or when someone has lost touch with relatives
  • Court backlogs in larger cities, where probate that should take six to eight weeks can take four to six months
  • Executors distributing informally before the clearance certificate arrives, then having to unwind it

None of these are unusual. They’re the ordinary texture of settling almost any estate, and they’re precisely what most people have never been told to expect.

If you’ve been named executor, or you’re already partway through the role, having a clear picture of what’s ahead, and what to watch for, changes how the whole process feels. Executor’s Compass™ walks through each stage of estate administration in order, with the milestones and warning signs built in, so you’re never guessing what comes next or how long it’s reasonable to wait. The Executor’s Compass™ Suite builds on that with a timeline you can track against your own estate and the tools to manage the passing of accounts and final distribution once you get there. If you haven’t said yes yet, Before You Say Yes™ is worth going through first. It’s built specifically to help you understand what you’re agreeing to before you agree to it.

Kaveh got through it. The estate closed just past the two-year mark, and looking back, he says the hardest part wasn’t any single task. It was not knowing, for months at a time, whether the silence meant something had gone wrong or whether it just meant he had to wait. If you’re in that silence right now, it probably just means you have to wait. That’s worth knowing on its own.

Visit our services page to see how we can help.

Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:

Prefer a podcast? Listen here!

Please send us your questions or share your comments.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

The 15-Minute Fix Most Estate Plans Are Missing

admin Estate Planning , , , , ,
Couple reviewing estate planning steps and beneficiary forms together at their kitchen table

The Estate Planning Excuse That Doesn’t Hold Up Anymore

Levi had been meaning to update his will for three years. Not because anything was wrong with it, but because every time he thought about starting, his mind jumped straight to lawyers, appointments, and a to-do list that felt too big to fit into a normal week. So he kept putting it off. Not out of denial. Just out of a vague sense that it would take more time and effort than he had to give.

Financial columnist Christopher Liew covered this exact pattern in a recent CTV News piece, walking through the five estate planning steps Canadians delay the most. It’s worth reading if you haven’t. What it doesn’t spend much time on is the part that actually gets people moving: what does each step involve day to day, how long does it take, and where do people get stuck once they try?

Here’s the practical version.

Writing a will

This is the one everyone pictures first, and the one people delay longest. Realistically, it takes a few hours spread across a couple of sessions: gathering a list of your assets, deciding who gets what, choosing an executor, and then either meeting with a lawyer or working through a guided will preparation tool. The point that people get stuck on isn’t usually the legal part. It’s decision fatigue. People stall because they haven’t decided who should raise their kids, or they’re avoiding an awkward conversation about unequal inheritances. Those decisions take thought, but they don’t take forever once you sit down with them.

What tends to get lost in the delay is what happens if you never get there. Dying without a will means dying intestate, and the court in your jurisdiction decides who gets what using a fixed legal formula instead of your wishes. Someone still has to apply to the court for permission to administer the estate, which takes time and money that your family may not have to spare. And in several jurisdictions, a common-law partner has no automatic right to inherit anything, no matter how many years you were together. A will isn’t really about avoiding death. It’s about making sure a formula doesn’t make these calls instead of you.

Reviewing your beneficiary designations

This is the step with the best return on the least effort, and it’s the one people assume is complicated when it isn’t. Your RRSP, TFSA, pension, and life insurance policies all pass directly to whoever is named as beneficiary on file with the institution. That designation sits outside your will entirely, which means an out-of-date form can undo everything your will says and leave assets to people you no longer wished to receive them.

Reviewing this takes one phone call or one online form per institution, usually under fifteen minutes each. You’re not drafting anything. You’re confirming a name is still correct, and updating it if it isn’t. Most people have three to five accounts that need this check: a workplace pension, an RRSP or TFSA at your bank or investment firm, and any life insurance policies. An afternoon covers all of it.

One detail worth knowing before you make that call: on a TFSA, you can name your spouse as successor holder rather than just beneficiary. A successor holder takes over the account as-is and it keeps growing tax-free. A beneficiary only receives the account’s value at death, and growth after that point can become taxable. It’s a one-word difference on a form that changes the tax outcome. Ask specifically for successor holder status when you call.

When Diane Almost Missed It

Diane got divorced in 2019 and remarried in 2023. She updated her will right after the wedding. What she didn’t update was the beneficiary on her workplace pension, which still listed her first husband. Her second husband found out during a routine plan review, not an emergency. She fixed it with a five-minute call to HR. If that review hadn’t happened, her pension would have gone to someone she hadn’t been married to in years, regardless of what her will said.

Understanding the tax bill nobody expects

Canada doesn’t have an inheritance tax, and a lot of people stop their thinking right there. But when you die, the CRA treats your capital property as though you sold it the moment before death. That deemed disposition can trigger a real capital gains bill on your final tax return, and any RRSP or RRIF you hold gets taxed as income unless it rolls over to a spouse or a financially dependent child or grandchild.

The number that catches people off guard is how fast this adds up. A cottage bought decades ago for a fraction of its current value, an investment portfolio that’s grown for thirty years, a RRIF sitting at six figures: any of these can generate a tax bill in the tens of thousands on a single final return, due all at once rather than spread across years the way it would have been if you were still alive to manage the withdrawals.

This isn’t a step you complete in an afternoon the way the beneficiary review is. It’s a conversation you need to have, either with an accountant, tax specialist or with whoever helps you build your will, about what your estate will actually owe and where that money will come from. Budget an hour to sit down with your account statements and get a rough sense of your exposure. It won’t be exact, but it’ll be enough to know whether this needs real planning, like life insurance to cover the bill or a gradual RRIF drawdown strategy, or just a mental note.

Signing your powers of attorney

A will only takes effect after you’re gone. If you become incapacitated while you’re still alive, you need two separate documents: one giving someone authority over your property and finances, and one giving someone authority over your personal and medical care. Each takes about an hour to complete once you know who you’d name. The hesitation here is rarely logistical. Naming someone feels like admitting something could go wrong. It’s the opposite. It’s making sure the right person has authority to act, instead of leaving your family to apply to a court for guardianship while your bills sit unpaid and decisions about your care sit in limbo.

This is also one of the few steps that helps you while you’re still alive, not just after. A stroke, an accident, or a sudden illness can leave you unable to manage your own affairs at any age. Without these documents in place, your spouse can’t necessarily step in and pay your mortgage or talk to your doctors on your behalf, even if you’ve been married for decades.

If you want a structured way to work through your own thinking before any of this goes into a lawyer’s office or a form, Designed or Default™ walks you through the difference between planning intentionally and letting default rules decide for you. And if you’re ready to organize the decisions themselves, Estate Architect™ gives you a guided way to work through them before your appointment, so the time you spend with a professional is spent finalizing, not figuring out where to start.

Actually telling your family the plan

The last step isn’t a document at all. It’s making sure the people around you know where to find things. Tell your executor where your will is stored. Keep a list of your accounts, insurance policies, and digital assets somewhere your family can actually locate. This takes an hour or two, usually faster if you work from a checklist instead of starting from a blank page. You don’t need to share every dollar figure. You just need to make sure nobody is left guessing on the worst day of their lives.

None of these five steps require a free weekend or a complicated life event to get started. Most of them take less time than the thinking about them has already cost you.

Levi ended up starting with his will after all, on a Saturday morning he’d originally set aside for yard work. It took him most of the afternoon, not because it was hard, but because he kept stopping to think about the decisions before doing the drafting. By the time he closed his laptop, the yard work hadn’t happened, but the will had.

Visit our services page to see how we can help.

Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:

Prefer a podcast? Listen here!

Please send us your questions or share your comments.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

What Your Cottage Will Actually Cost Your Kids

admin Estate Planning , , , ,
Quiet wooden cabin on a Canadian lake at sunrise with a dock, canoe, and Muskoka chair, representing vacation property succession planning

The $150,000 Surprise Waiting in Your Family’s Cabin

There’s a moment that happens at a lot of family lake properties, usually near the end of a long weekend. Someone looks out at the water and says something like, “This place has to stay in the family.” Everyone nods. Nobody says anything else, and that’s usually where the planning ends.

Central and Eastern Canada calls it the cottage. Here in the West, we call it the cabin. Different word, same problem. It’s the property nobody wants to talk about losing, and the one families are least prepared to actually keep.

I understand the hesitation. This isn’t just a line item to most families. It’s where the kids learned to swim, where someone taught everyone to play crib at that same table, where the same board games have lived in the same cupboard for thirty years. Talking about what happens to it after Mom and Dad are gone feels like inviting the ending into the room.

But here’s what I see over and over. The families who avoid the conversation don’t protect the cottage. They just hand their kids a hard decision and a tax bill nobody warned them about.

The tax bill that shows up uninvited

Canada doesn’t have an inheritance tax, and that fact alone convinces a lot of families the cottage passes down free and clear. But it doesn’t work that way.

When someone dies, the CRA treats them as having sold everything they owned at fair market value the moment before death, even though nothing actually sold. It’s called a deemed disposition, and for a property that’s been in the family for decades, the number can be a shock.

Say your parents bought a lake property in 1985 for $120,000, and it’s worth $850,000 today. That’s a $730,000 capital gain sitting on their final tax return. Half of it, $365,000, gets added to their income for that year. Depending on the province and their other income, the tax owing can land somewhere between $160,000 and $200,000. Sometimes more.

And here’s the part that catches families off guard: that bill comes due before anyone inherits anything. If the estate doesn’t have the cash, something has to be sold to cover it. Often, that something is the cabin itself. The family doesn’t lose it because anyone wanted to sell. They lose it because nobody planned for the tax.

When Raymond got the call from the accountant
Raymond and his two sisters inherited the family cabin at Sylvan Lake when their mother passed. Their parents bought it for $95,000 in the early nineties. It appraised at $780,000. The accountant walked Raymond through the final return: the deemed disposition put over $340,000 of taxable income on his mother’s last filing, and the estate owed roughly $150,000 in tax. The estate’s bank accounts held about $60,000. The siblings had ninety days to come up with the difference or list the cabin. They listed the cabin.

The part parents don’t expect: the kids may not even want it

Here’s something I’ve noticed working with families over the years; it’s usually the parents who are attached to the cottage, not the kids.

The parents built the memories there. They spent thirty summers doing the dock repairs, the dinners, the traditions. To them, the cottage is the family. But their adult kids often have a different life entirely. One lives across the country. Another has a young family and no time for property upkeep two hours away. A third genuinely loves the place but can’t afford a third of the taxes and the new septic system it’s going to need.

Parents assume the kids will want what they wanted. Often, they won’t, not in the same way. And that gap between what Mom and Dad hope for and what the next generation actually has the time, money, or desire for is where a lot of these plans fall apart. It’s worth having that conversation honestly, before it’s written into a will as a foregone conclusion.

The fallacies that cost families the most

Fear makes a terrible planner. When the capital gains changes were proposed back in 2024, I watched families rush into decisions based on headlines. Some of those decisions can’t be undone. So let’s clear up the myths doing the most damage.

“The new higher capital gains rate means we have to act now.” No. The proposed increase to the inclusion rate was cancelled entirely in March 2025. The rate is still 50%, right where it’s been for years. If you’re reading advice from 2024 that references a 66.67% inclusion rate, it’s describing rules that never took effect. Families who transferred properties in a panic during that window triggered real tax bills to dodge a change that never happened.

“We’ll just gift it to the kids and skip the tax.” The CRA doesn’t recognize gifting as a way around capital gains. Any transfer below fair market value is treated as if it happened at fair market value. Gift the cabin to your daughter today, and you owe tax on the full gain today, exactly as if you’d sold it to a stranger. Gifting only changes the timing, not the bill.

“We renovated constantly, so the gain can’t be that big.” Renovations reduce the gain, but only capital improvements count: a new roof, an addition, a rebuilt dock. Painting, repairs, and general maintenance don’t. And the burden of proof is on you. The CRA routinely denies cost base increases that aren’t backed by receipts. Thirty years of improvements with no paperwork looks, to the CRA, like thirty years of nothing.

“Adding the kids to the title avoids all of this.” Putting children on title as joint owners can sidestep probate, but the transfer itself usually triggers a partial capital gain right away. It also exposes the cabin to your kids’ lives: their creditors, their divorces, their financial troubles. A cabin on your son’s title becomes an asset in your son’s divorce.

The planning tools that actually work

None of this means the cabin is doomed. It means it needs a plan, and real options exist.

Life insurance sized to the tax bill. For a lot of families, this is the simplest fix. A policy that pays out on the second parent’s death, sized to cover the estimated capital gains tax, gives the estate the cash to pay CRA without selling anything. The cabin stays. It’s not glamorous, but it solves the exact problem that forces most sales.

Trusts, with eyes open. Parents over 65 can move a property into certain trusts without triggering immediate tax, which buys time and control. But trusts come with a built-in deadline: a deemed disposition every 21 years. A trust isn’t a way to avoid the tax forever. It’s a way to choose when and how the family deals with it.

Gradual transfer. Transferring partial interests to adult children over several years spreads the gain across multiple tax years, often at lower rates than one lump hit on a final return. It takes discipline and good advice, but it turns one crushing bill into several manageable ones.

The principal residence question. Families with a city home and a cabin get to choose which property the exemption shelters, year by year. If the cabin has grown in value faster than the house, designating the cabin may save more tax. That’s a calculation worth doing with a professional before the will gets finalized, not a guess.

The fight nobody plans for

Money is only half of it. The other half is what happens between the kids once the cottage actually lands on their plate.

Leave it to three siblings equally, without any framework, and you haven’t given them a gift. You’ve given them a negotiation, at the worst possible time, with no rules attached.

The courts are full of these stories. Verbal promises about who gets the cottage. Title transferred to some kids and not others. Wills that never mention the arrangement everyone assumed was understood. These cases drag on for years, cost tens of thousands in legal fees, and end relationships that a single signed document could have saved.

When Keiko asked her brothers to write the rules themselves
Keiko’s parents wanted their Muskoka cottage to go to all three kids. Instead of just writing it into the will, her father asked the three of them to draft a sharing agreement first: who pays what, who gets which weeks, what happens if someone wants out. Keiko and her older brother had a working draft in a month. Her younger brother read it and admitted he didn’t actually want the cottage. He wanted the equivalent value from the estate instead. It made for an awkward dinner. It was also the cheapest dispute resolution the family ever paid for, because it happened while their parents were alive and could still adjust the will.

That’s the strategy I like best: have the next generation draft the co-ownership agreement themselves, before anything transfers. If they can’t agree on paper while everyone’s healthy and talking, they won’t agree at the lawyer’s office after a funeral. And if the exercise reveals that one kid doesn’t actually want the cabin, that’s not a failure. That’s the plan doing its job.

A good agreement covers cost sharing, a usage schedule, how repairs get decided, what happens when someone wants out, and how disputes get settled.

Where you live changes the math

The province matters too. Here in Alberta, there’s no estate administration tax, just flat court fees capped at a few hundred dollars regardless of estate size. An Ontario family with the same cottage faces probate fees of roughly 1.5% of the estate’s value, which is why Ontario cottage owners often use strategies like multiple wills that make no sense out here. Quebec runs on different concepts entirely. Advice that’s perfect in one province can be pointless in another, so make sure whoever’s guiding you knows the rules where the property actually sits.

If your family keeps avoiding or circling this conversation without landing anywhere, The Will Blueprint™ walks you through exactly the decisions above, who inherits, how it’s structured, what to flag for your lawyer. You’ll walk into that appointment with your thinking done and your questions ready, instead of paying hourly rates to figure out what you want. Find it with all my planning tools at nexsteps.ca/tools/.

The cabin holds the family’s best memories. It shouldn’t hold its worst fight. The families who keep it for another generation aren’t the luckiest ones or the richest ones. They’re the ones who had the conversation honestly, memories and all, and then kept talking after everyone came in off the dock.

Visit our services page to see how we can help.

Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:

Prefer a podcast? Listen here!

Please send us your questions or share your comments.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

Locked Out: What Happens to Your Digital Life When You Die

admin Estate Planning , , , ,
Man locked out of his late father's online accounts, laptop showing an account locked screen beside estate documents and a crypto wallet balance

The Digital Side of Estate Planning

When Arjun Mehta’s father died in the fall, the funeral was the least of his problems. His dad’s line of credit payment was due in four days, and the only way into the bank’s site was a two-factor code sent to an email account Arjun couldn’t open. He later learned his dad had set up a Google Inactive Account Manager years earlier, naming a friend Arjun had never met as the one who’d eventually get access, long after any four-day window would have mattered.

That’s the story most people don’t hear until it happens to them. We plan for the house, the bank accounts, the car. Almost nobody plans for the version of themselves that lives online, and the gap between what people assume happens to their digital accounts and what actually happens can catch even the most prepared families off guard.

The assumption that trips everyone up

Most people picture their executor logging into an account the same way they would: type in a password, see everything, done. In reality, an executor’s authority comes from a grant of probate, and that authority is meant to extend to every asset in the estate, including digital ones. The problem is that privacy law and platform terms of service don’t always agree with that. An executor can have every legal right to an account and still get turned away.

Canada doesn’t have a national framework for this the way some other countries do. What exists instead is a patchwork: a handful of provinces with legislation, a few court decisions that are starting to push back on uncooperative platforms, and a lot of families left to figure it out account by account.

Where executors get stuck

Cryptocurrency is the sharpest example of this problem, because access depends entirely on how the asset was held. If it sat on an exchange, an executor can generally file a death claim with a death certificate and probate documents, much like closing a brokerage account. If it was self-custodied in a wallet, the private keys are the only way in, and if those keys are not accessible, there’s no customer service line to call to recover them.

When Léa Fontaine was 34…
her partner died unexpectedly, and she knew he’d been putting money into Bitcoin for a few years. She just didn’t know where. She found a hardware wallet in a drawer, but no password, no seed phrase, nothing written down anywhere. Months later, she’s still not certain how much was there or whether it’s gone for good.

Crypto investors got a national-scale lesson in this when Gerald Cotten, founder of what was once Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, QuadrigaCX, died suddenly in 2018. He was the only person who knew the passwords to the exchange’s cold wallets. According to his widow’s affidavit filed in the bankruptcy proceedings, roughly $250 million CAD in customer crypto was left locked away, unreachable by anyone else. It’s an extreme case, but the underlying problem, one person holding the only key, plays out in ordinary estates every day.

Email, cloud storage, and social media hinge on whatever tools the platform happens to offer, and this is where Arjun’s story matters most. Google has an Inactive Account Manager. Apple has a Digital Legacy program. Facebook has a Legacy Contact. Under the model legislation several provinces are working from, whichever instruction came most recently takes priority. So someone who names a digital executor in their will, then years later sets up an Inactive Account Manager and forgets about it, has narrowed what that executor can do.

Subscriptions and online banking are the least dramatic and the most time-consuming. Executors typically need a death certificate and proof of their authority just to close an account or access a balance, and with dozens of small recurring accounts, the paperwork adds up fast even when nothing valuable is at stake.

That paperwork assumes the executor already knows what they’re looking for. Often they don’t. Without a list, an executor is left piecing things together from paper statements, old emails, and whatever recurring charges show up on a bank statement after the fact. A streaming subscription might keep billing a credit card that’s still active without anyone noticing. A second bank account at a smaller institution might never show up at all, because there’s no central registry that tells an executor where someone banked. Account numbers, in particular, are rarely written down anywhere, which means even a cooperative bank often needs the executor to prove the account exists before they’ll discuss it, not the other way around.

How this shifts by province

Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick have all passed legislation that gives an appointed executor or attorney a clear right to deal with digital assets, similar to how they’d handle any other property. Most other provinces still have nothing specific on the books, which means the default is whatever the platform’s own terms of service happen to say.

Alberta hasn’t passed anything yet, but movement is happening on two fronts. The Alberta Law Reform Institute recommended in 2024 that the province adopt this kind of legislation, confirming an executor’s existing authority already extends to digital accounts. Then this spring, in a case called Wada Estate, the Court of King’s Bench affirmed that tech companies are bound by a grant of administration just like anyone else, and shouldn’t be allowed to slow down an estate simply because the asset happens to be digital. The law isn’t on the books yet, but the courts are already moving in that direction.

When Priyanka Osei was 58…
she was named executor for her sister’s estate and assumed the grant of probate would open every door. It opened most of them. One overseas subscription service simply refused to respond to anything, probate included, and there was no local court to compel it. She eventually let it go. Some things stay out of reach, and knowing that ahead of time would have saved her weeks of frustration.

British Columbia has no specific framework either. Its estate legislation predates cryptocurrency and cloud computing entirely, so digital assets get handled under general property law, with a grant of probate theoretically covering them even though platforms don’t always see it that way.

What makes a difference

Legal authority usually isn’t the obstacle anymore, especially with courts starting to push back the way they did in Wada Estate. What trips executors up is not knowing an account exists in the first place.

A few things consistently make the difference:

  • A current, maintained list of accounts and where they’re held, updated as things change, not written once and forgotten.
  • For crypto specifically, the location of wallets and keys matters more than anything written in the will itself.
  • Passwords never belong in the will. Wills become public documents through probate, so credentials need a separate, secure home.
  • Platform tools like an Inactive Account Manager or Legacy Contact should be set up to match what the will says.

This is what In Plain Sight™ was built for: one place to record every account, every asset, every digital detail your executor will need, so none of it depends on someone finding a hardware wallet in a drawer or guessing at a password. It’s part of the full planning toolkit.

Getting it all in one place

Once you’ve built your In Plain Sight record, it exports as both a PDF and a downloadable file, so however you choose to store it, the record itself travels with you.

Where you keep that finished document matters too. A fireproof home safe works. A safety deposit box works. Some people also choose to store the completed file in an encrypted online vault, like the one offered by InheritIQ, so it’s accessible the moment it’s needed instead of locked away somewhere only they know about.

Arjun eventually got into his dad’s accounts, days later than he needed to. His dad had done almost everything right. He just hadn’t connected the will to the accounts themselves, and that is what catches most families off guard.

Visit our services page to see how we can help.

Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:

Prefer a podcast? Listen here!

Please send us your questions or share your comments.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

She Paid Mom’s Bills for Years Until the Bank Froze the Account.

admin Estate Planning , , , ,
Adult daughter helping manage bills for aging parent, power of attorney planning

You’ve Been Handling Your Parent’s Finances for Years. You May Have No Legal Authority to Do Any of It.

Colette had a system. Every second Tuesday, she’d sit at her mother’s kitchen table with the mail sorted into three piles: bills to pay, statements to file, and anything from the government that needed a phone call. She’d been doing it for eighteen months, ever since her mom’s eyesight got bad enough that reading a hydro bill became too difficult.

Nobody had ever questioned it. Colette knew her mother’s account numbers. She knew the answers to the security questions. She’d sat next to her mom on speakerphone with the bank so many times that one of the tellers at the branch knew her by name and would wave her through to the counter.

Then her mother had a fall in March. Nothing catastrophic, a hairline fracture and a few weeks of rehab, but it was enough that Colette needed to move some money around to cover a private caregiver while her mom recovered. She called the bank the way she always did.

This time, the answer was different. The account was flagged. Her mother’s cognitive assessment from the hospital had been noted in a routine records request, and the bank’s compliance team wanted proof that Colette had legal authority to act on the account before releasing another dollar. Not proof that she’d been doing it responsibly. Not proof that her mother trusted her. Proof that the law said she could.

Colette didn’t have it. Nobody had ever put it in writing.

What actually gives someone authority

Being a name on a joint account, having a debit card, or knowing someone’s PIN isn’t legal authority. Neither is a phone call where your parent tells the bank “she can handle this for me.” Financial institutions rely on those informal arrangements every day, right up until something changes, whether it’s a health scare, a large or unusual transaction, or simply a staff member following a compliance rule that didn’t used to get enforced as strictly.

The document that actually grants authority is an Enduring Power of Attorney or a Power of Attorney for Finance.  It’s called different things in different jurisdictions, but the authority it grants is the same. It’s a legal instrument your parent signs while they’re mentally capable, naming someone (often called an attorney, though no law degree is required) to manage their financial and legal affairs. It can take effect immediately or only once a doctor confirms incapacity, depending on how it’s drafted. Once it’s in place, a bank, a pension provider, or a government office has something concrete to check against. Without it, they have no legal basis to let anyone but the account holder make decisions, no matter how long that person has been doing the work.

This is the part that so often catches families off guard. A POA isn’t a formality for people who don’t trust each other. It’s the mechanism that lets trust actually function once a bank or a government office needs proof instead of a phone call.

A closer look: When Tariq’s father was hospitalized after a stroke, Tariq assumed his years of managing his dad’s online banking would count for something. The hospital needed consent for a treatment decision tied to a life insurance policy, and the insurer wanted documentation, not a son’s word. Without a POA on file, Tariq spent three days getting a lawyer to draft an emergency application while decisions that should have taken an hour sat unresolved.

Why adding your name to the account isn’t the fix

A lot of families think they’ve already solved this by adding an adult child to a parent’s bank account as a joint holder. It feels like the practical shortcut: no lawyer, no paperwork, just a form at the branch. And it does give that child access to move money and pay bills, which is exactly why so many people think that’s a solution.

But a joint account isn’t the same thing as legal authority to manage a parent’s affairs, and it comes with its own set of problems. Legally, a joint account holder owns the funds, not just the ability to access them. That can create real complications if your parent later needs to qualify for certain government benefits, if there’s a dispute among siblings about how the money was used, or if you have creditors of your own who could, in some provinces, claim against funds sitting in an account with your name on it. It also doesn’t cover anything outside that one account. It says nothing about your parent’s investments, their pension, their tax filings, or any decision that requires someone to act on their behalf rather than simply move money they already have access to.

An Enduring Power of Attorney does what a joint account can’t. It authorizes someone to act in your parent’s name across the full scope of their financial and legal affairs, without transferring ownership of anything. Your parent stays the owner. You become the person legally permitted to manage things on their behalf, with the authority to prove it when an institution asks.

Why “we’ll get to it” doesn’t work

The reason so many families end up here isn’t neglect. It’s timing. A POA is easy to talk yourself out of when everything still feels manageable. Your parent is still driving, still remembers birthdays, still seems like themselves. Setting up legal paperwork can feel like planning for a version of them that hasn’t arrived yet, and bringing it up can feel like an accusation: I think you’re declining.

But a POA can only be signed while your parent has the legal capacity to understand what they’re agreeing to. Once a diagnosis, a fall, or a hospital stay changes that, the option is gone. At that point the only path forward is a court application for guardianship or trusteeship, which is slower, more expensive, and in most provinces requires a judge to weigh in on decisions your parent could have made themselves in twenty minutes with a lawyer.

The families who avoid the freeze, the delay, the court process, are the ones who treat the POA as something you set up while things are calm, not something you scramble for once they aren’t.

If you’re the one who’s already doing the work, whether that’s bill payments, appointment scheduling, or fielding calls from your parent’s bank, the conversation about formalizing it doesn’t need to be difficult. It can start as simply as asking what would happen if you weren’t available for a week. That question tends to answer itself.

Where to start

Our tool Who Speaks for You?™ walks a family through exactly what a Power of Attorney needs to cover and helps you prepare for that conversation with a lawyer instead of walking in unsure of what to ask. And because financial authority is only half the picture, Your Voice Your Care™ does the same for a Personal Directive, the document that lets someone make health and personal care decisions if your parent can’t communicate them directly. Together, they cover the two gaps that leave families stuck: money and medical care.

Colette got her mother’s POA sorted three weeks after the account freeze. It took one appointment with a lawyer and a signature. She still wonders what would have happened if the fall had been worse, and the account had stayed locked for longer than a brief appointment could fix.

Visit our services page to see how we can help.

Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:

Prefer a podcast? Listen here!

Please send us your questions  or share your comments.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

Why Don’t Most Canadians Have an Estate Plan?

admin Estate Planning , , , ,
Estate planning documents and notes on a kitchen table, representing the gap between intention and action in Canadian estate planning.

They Keep Saying They’ll Get to It, But Most Never Do.

Marcus and Keiko had been together for eleven years. They owned a home, had two kids in elementary school, and both worked full time. They were organized people. They budgeted. They had RESPs. Every so often, usually after hearing something on the news or after a friend mentioned a difficult probate situation, one of them would say, “We really should get our wills done.” The other would agree. Then the week would fill up again, and the conversation would quietly disappear.

They’re not unusual. They’re the majority.

A new study from IG Wealth Management, released in May 2026, surveyed 1,024 adult Canadians and found that 84 percent say having an estate plan is important. But only 41 percent actually have one. That’s not a knowledge gap. People know they need a plan. So what’s getting in the way?

The awareness is there. The follow-through is not.

When nearly everyone agrees that something matters and fewer than half have done it, the problem isn’t information. It’s resistance; the kind of resistance that builds up around anything that feels big, complicated, and uncomfortable all at the same time. Estate planning lives at the intersection of money, mortality, and family dynamics. That combination is uniquely good at making people look away.

There’s also a timing problem. Estate planning rarely feels urgent in the conventional sense. No deadline arrives. No one sends a reminder. Life simply continues, and the task waits.

The IG study also found a specific gap around charitable giving. Sixty-eight percent of Canadians believe charitable giving should be part of an estate plan. Fewer than a third have formally discussed that intention with an advisor or their family. They have the wish. They haven’t taken the step that would give their wish any legal authority.

What’s actually stopping people?

Most people who haven’t completed an estate plan aren’t uninformed. They’re stuck. When you take a deeper look at where the sticking point is, a few things tend to come up.

The first is not knowing where to start. People picture a lawyer’s office, a stack of documents, and a series of decisions they don’t feel equipped to make. They’re not sure what they actually need. They don’t know what questions to bring.

The second is not knowing what they want. It’s hard to book an appointment to discuss your wishes if you haven’t sorted out what your wishes are. Who raises your children if something happens to both of you? How do you want your assets divided? What happens to the business? These aren’t questions with obvious answers, and sitting down to formalize them when they’re still unresolved feels like walking into a test unprepared.

The third is avoidance. The topic involves thinking about your own death, or incapacity, or the possibility of a spouse dying first. Most people would rather not spend a weeknight on that.

None of these are unreasonable responses. They’re human responses. But they have consequences, and those consequences are rarely felt by the person who delayed. They’re felt by the family left to sort things out.

It’s not just a will.

Here’s something worth understanding: an estate plan isn’t just a will. It includes who manages your finances if you’re incapacitated. It includes your healthcare wishes and who speaks for you if you can’t. It includes beneficiary designations on registered accounts and insurance policies that pass completely outside your will. It includes how your executor is going to know what you own and where to find it.

Each of those areas has decisions attached to it. And most people haven’t thought them through in any structured way.

That’s not a criticism. It’s simply what happens when a topic feels overwhelming and there’s no clear place to begin.

What a real first step looks like.

The first step in estate planning isn’t booking a lawyer. It’s getting clear on what areas need your attention and what decisions each one actually requires.

A lawyer documents your choices and makes them legally binding. But they need you to show up with some sense of what you want to accomplish. If you haven’t done that thinking, you work it out in real time at billable rates, and you often still leave the appointment with things unresolved.

Two tools in the NEXsteps Planning Toolkit are built for exactly that preparatory stage. Both are jurisdiction-specific, covering all thirteen Canadian provinces and territories, so the guidance reflects the rules where you actually live.

Estate Architect™ is a comprehensive, self-guided tool that walks you through every major area of estate planning: wills and trusts, powers of attorney and incapacity planning, personal directives, beneficiary designations, executor roles and responsibilities, and tax considerations including deemed disposition and probate fees. Built-in Q&A guides you through the questions that tend to come up along the way. It works whether you haven’t started yet or have existing documents you’re not sure still fit your life. At the end, you’ll have a clear picture of where things stand and a more informed starting point for the conversations that matter.

The Will Blueprint™ goes deeper on the will itself. It takes you through twelve sections, from jurisdiction and personal information to executor selection, guardianship for minor children, asset overview, estate distribution, and specific wishes. As you work through it, the tool flags issues that need attention before you meet a lawyer. When you’re done, you can print or save a summary to bring to your appointment, a complete record of your answers and every flag the tool raised, so nothing gets missed at the table.

Neither tool replaces legal advice. They’re the preparation that makes the professional conversation actually worthwhile.

When Diane finally sat down before her appointment

She’d booked the lawyer meeting under pressure, knowing it was overdue. But she wasn’t ready. She didn’t know who she’d name as executor, hadn’t thought through what would happen to her condo, and had no idea her beneficiary designation on her RRSP was still her ex-husband’s name. She spent two evenings working through The Will Blueprint, section by section: her family situation, her assets, her executor, her estate distribution wishes. The tool flagged four issues she hadn’t considered, including the RRSP designation. She printed the summary and walked into the appointment with it in hand.

Based on the IG Wealth Management study, nearly 20 million Canadians are in the same place Marcus and Keiko are, waiting for the right moment, or the right prompt, or enough clarity to feel ready. The data confirms that being in the majority on this one isn’t where you want to be.

Getting clear on where you stand is a place to start. That part doesn’t require a lawyer’s appointment.

Visit our services page to see how we can help.

Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:

Prefer a podcast? Listen here!

Please send us your questions or share your comments.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

They Trusted You. The Court Will Judge You.

admin Executor and Estate Administration , , , , ,
Woman sitting at a kitchen table reviewing estate documents and receipts, looking concerned

What Will You Actually Be Judged On? The Executor Standard Most People Have Never Heard Of

A friend of mine once described agreeing to be someone’s executor the way most people do: “They asked. I said yes. It seemed like the right thing to do.”

That’s the whole conversation for most named executors. Someone they loved asked them to take on the role, and they said yes out of loyalty, trust, or simple affection. What they didn’t know, and what almost no one tells them, is that the moment they accept, they step into a legal framework that holds them to a specific standard of conduct. One they’ve probably never heard of. One they can be personally liable for failing to meet.

This isn’t meant to scare anyone. But if you’ve been named as an executor, or you’re thinking about saying yes, the single most important question you can ask yourself is this: what will I actually be judged on?

The Standard Has a Name

In Canadian law, executors are held to the standard of a reasonably skilled person acting in a fiduciary capacity. That phrase carries a lot of weight.

“Reasonably skilled” doesn’t mean you need a law degree or an accounting designation. But it does mean you’re expected to make sound, informed decisions, seek professional help when the situation calls for it, and not act carelessly just because you’re volunteering your time.

“Fiduciary capacity” is the bigger piece. A fiduciary is someone who is legally required to put the interests of others ahead of their own. As an executor, you’re not managing the estate on your own behalf. You’re managing it on behalf of the beneficiaries. Your personal opinions about who deserves what, your own financial interests, and your relationships with certain family members cannot factor into your decisions.

Together, these two ideas form what’s sometimes called the executor standard. It isn’t a checklist someone hands you at the funeral. It’s a legal expectation that runs across everything you do from the moment you begin administering the estate.

What the Standard Actually Covers

Courts and legal commentators generally look at a few key areas when evaluating whether an executor has met their obligations.

Prudent decision-making. An executor is expected to act the way a reasonable, careful person would. That means not rushing, not delaying unnecessarily, and not making decisions based on what’s easiest or most convenient. If you’re unsure about something, the standard expects you to find out.

Impartiality toward beneficiaries. This one trips people up. If your best friend named you executor and their estranged sibling is a beneficiary, you can’t let your personal feelings influence how you handle distributions. Every beneficiary is entitled to fair treatment, regardless of your history with them or your relationship with the deceased.

Record-keeping. You need to be able to account for every dollar that moves through the estate. What came in, what went out, when, and why. Courts can ask you to pass your accounts, meaning you present a formal accounting of everything you did and every expense you approved. If you can’t justify a charge, the court can disallow it. If the disallowed amounts are significant, you can be ordered to repay them personally.

Timely action. Estates don’t run on their own timelines. There are tax deadlines, probate requirements, property decisions, and beneficiary rights involved. Letting things slide because the process is overwhelming or because family members are in conflict doesn’t protect you. It creates liability.

Duty not to profit. Unless the will specifically authorizes it, an executor isn’t supposed to personally benefit from their position beyond the executor’s compensation that’s standard in their province or territory. Self-dealing, favoring your own interests, or taking advantage of estate assets is a serious breach.

When the Standard Isn’t Met

Earlier this year, a BC Supreme Court decision called Gowans Estate (Re), 2026 BCSC 17 landed in Canadian legal media. It’s worth paying attention to because it illustrates how the standard plays out in real life.

When the Accounting Didn’t Hold Up: Gowans Estate, BC 2026

The executor claimed reimbursement for several categories of expenses from the estate, including 14 months of cable service, medical oxygen supplies, and dog food and care costs including a live-in caregiver for the deceased’s dogs, alongside a 5% executor’s fee totalling over $49,000. When the matter came before the court, the associate judge disallowed over $39,000 in claimed expenses, finding they weren’t properly justified estate costs. The executor was then ordered to bear his own legal costs for the process of preparing and passing the accounts. A significant personal financial consequence for someone who likely believed he was doing his job.

The case doesn’t imply wrongdoing in the traditional sense. But it shows that claiming expenses you can’t properly justify, and failing to maintain the kind of documentation and judgment the standard requires, can cost you personally.

This isn’t an isolated situation. As estates become more complex, as family structures get more complicated, and as beneficiaries become more aware of their rights, executor conduct is under more scrutiny than it’s ever been.

If you’ve been named as an executor and you’re trying to understand what you’ve actually agreed to, two tools can help. Before You Say Yes™ is for people who’ve been asked to take on the role and want to think through what they’re agreeing to before they commit. The Executor’s Standard™ is a scenario-based self-assessment that follows a fictional executor named Sandra through nine realistic moments in an estate administration. At each one, you choose how you’d respond, and see what each choice puts at risk. You finish with a personalized conduct profile and a printable reference card. Neither tool replaces legal advice, but they give you a foundation, and that’s a solid place to start.

Most Named Executors Don’t Know Any of This

Here’s what makes this hard. The person who named you as their executor trusted you completely. They probably didn’t sit you down and walk you through what the role actually involves. They probably didn’t know either. You may have agreed years ago, before you had any idea what estate administration entails.

That’s not a character flaw. It’s just the reality of how these conversations happen.

The problem is that not knowing doesn’t protect you. The standard applies whether you understood it going in or not. Knowing what you’ll be judged on before something goes wrong is always better than figuring it out after.

Visit our services page to see how we can help.

Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:

Prefer a podcast? Listen here!

Please send us your questions or share your comments.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

Will Ready Isn’t Estate Ready

admin Estate Planning , , , ,
A woman stands at a kitchen table covered in papers, envelopes, and sticky notes with handwritten labels including "Call Lawyer," "Estate," "TD bank account?," "Hydro bill," "Life Insurance," and "Dad's info," looking overwhelmed as she sorts through documents after a death in the family

The Problem Isn’t the Will. It’s Everything Else.

When Priya’s mother passed away in February, she had a will. Signed, witnessed, stored with a lawyer. By every standard measure, her mother had done the right thing. But when Priya showed up at the family home the following week to begin the estate, she stood in the kitchen with a notepad and realized she had no idea where to start. She didn’t know which bank held the chequing account. She couldn’t find the insurance policy. The Rogers bill kept coming but there was no record of the login. The will said what her mother wanted done with her estate. It said nothing about how to find it.

That’s not a planning failure. That’s an organization failure. And we’re learning just how widespread the problem actually is.

What the Numbers Actually Show

The statistics on estate planning in Canada tend to focus on wills. Only about half of Canadians have one. Among millennials the number drops further. These are real gaps.

But here’s what the data also shows: even among Canadians who do have wills, most haven’t had a meaningful conversation with their family about where things are, what accounts exist, or what their wishes look like in practice. A 2025 Willful survey found that while 59 percent of Canadians say they’ve talked about end-of-life wishes, only 36 percent both know their family’s wishes and have actually shared their own. Another survey from the same year found that only a third of respondents had even discussed where they want to spend their final days.

The will gets written. The conversation doesn’t happen. The executor, often a spouse or adult child, inherits a puzzle with half the pieces missing.

What the First Week Actually Looks Like

I’m a Certified Executor Advisor, and I’ve served as an executor myself. Between those two things, I’ve seen this gap from every angle, and I can tell you that the first week of an estate has almost nothing to do with the will.

It often starts with death certificates. Depending on the estate, you may need several, because some institutions want their own original copy. Then comes the list. Which banks? Which accounts? Is there a line of credit? A safety deposit box? A pension that needs to be redirected or cancelled? Subscriptions charging a card that shouldn’t be used anymore? A digital storage account full of photos no one can access because the password died with the person?

The will doesn’t answer any of those questions. A well-organized estate does.

Most executors spend the first two to four weeks just locating things. Not distributing assets, not filing taxes, not dealing with beneficiaries. Just finding the pieces. Every hour spent hunting for a policy number or tracking down a financial institution is an hour of administrative cost to the estate, and an hour of time the executor isn’t getting back.

The family that prepared isn’t spared grief. But they’re spared the chaos that makes grief so much harder to get through.

Left In The Dark

When Colette’s husband passed away unexpectedly at 61, she found herself executor of an estate she knew almost nothing about. He had handled the finances. She knew roughly what they had, but not where it was held, who their insurance was through, or whether there were accounts she didn’t know about. She spent weeks on the phone, writing letters, and waiting. A year later, she still wasn’t entirely sure she’d found everything. That uncertainty is one of the quieter costs of an unorganized estate.

What Prepared Actually Looks Like

If you’re a homeowner, a parent, a common-law partner, a business owner, or anyone who has people in their life who’d be affected if something happened to you, the question isn’t whether you need a plan. It’s whether your plan is actually findable.

A will in a lawyer’s office is a start. But your executor also needs to know which financial institutions hold your accounts, where your insurance policies are and who to call, what your digital accounts are and how to access or close them, where your important documents are physically stored, who your key contacts are, and what your wishes are for the things a will doesn’t cover.

That’s not a legal document. That’s an organized record. And it’s what makes the difference between an executor who can move forward and one who spends months in a paper chase.

Straightforward. Until It Wasn’t.

When Tariq’s father died at 78, the family assumed the estate would be straightforward. There was a will, a house, and a modest investment account. What they didn’t have was any record of which institutions held what. Tariq spent weeks making calls, sending letters, and waiting for responses, all while trying to figure out whether there were accounts he hadn’t turned up yet. He never did feel entirely confident the estate was complete. That uncertainty doesn’t go away quickly.

Tools That Close the Gap

This is exactly why I built In Plain Sight™ as part of the NEXsteps planning toolkit. It’s a personal records organizer designed to capture all of it: your accounts, your documents, your digital life, your insurance, your key contacts. Structured so the person who steps in after you can find what they need without turning every drawer inside out. It prints cleanly so your executor can work from a hard copy, and it covers the categories that come up again and again in real estate administration.

For families who want to tackle the full picture, The Prepared Estate™ bundles In Plain Sight with Estate Architect™, a companion tool that walks you through the decisions that shape a complete estate plan before you sit down with a lawyer or an advisor.

Neither tool replaces a will. Neither replaces legal advice. But both address the gap that’s costing Canadian families weeks of confusion and real administrative time, every single day.

Explore In Plain Sight™, The Prepared Estate™, and the full NEXsteps planning toolkit.

Priya’s mother had a will. That was something. But it would have been so much easier, and so much more honouring of everything she built, if she’d left a map alongside it.

Don’t leave a scavenger hunt.

Visit our services page to see how we can help.

Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:

Prefer a podcast? Listen here!

Please send us your questions or share your comments.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

 

I’ll Be Dead Anyway

admin Estate Planning , , , , ,
An older man looking pensively outside with an image of his children, indicating choices of his estate gifts

He Told Me Three Things. Every One of Them Was Wrong.

Marcel isn’t an unreasonable man. He has a will. He’s thought about what happens when he dies, at least enough to put something on paper. He loves his five kids. He’s been married a long time, even if the marriage hasn’t been easy.

So when I mentioned that his will leaves everything to his spouse with no direction about personal property and suggested a family conversation might be worth having, I wasn’t prepared for how quickly he closed the door.

He said three things. I’ve heard all three before, more times than I can count.

“I’ll be dead. It won’t be my problem.”

“I know my kids. They won’t fight over anything.”

“After I’m gone, if she wants to deal with it, that’s up to her.”

Each one sounds reasonable. Each one is actually a decision, dressed up as indifference. And together, they’re setting up exactly the kind of situation Marcel believes he’s avoiding.

“I’ll be dead. It won’t be my problem.”

This one is technically true and practically useless.

Marcel won’t be there. He won’t witness the disagreement over who gets the dining room table, or the tools in the garage, or the watch he wore every day for thirty years. He won’t be there when two of his children feel like they deserved more clarity, or when one of them walks away from a family gathering feeling like something was taken from them.

But here’s what he will have done. He’ll have made a choice. Not choosing is still choosing. Leaving no direction about personal property, no expressed wishes, no conversation on record, is a decision that gets made by default. It just gets made by other people, under pressure, while they’re grieving.

The question isn’t whether it will be Marcel’s problem. It won’t be. The question is whose problem it becomes, and whether he’s comfortable with that.

Most people, when they think that through, aren’t as comfortable as they thought.

“I know my kids. They won’t fight over anything.”

Marcel probably does know his kids. But there’s a version of his kids he’s never met.

He hasn’t met them at sixty, navigating their own financial pressures, their own marriages, their own histories with each other that have accumulated over decades. He hasn’t met them grieving, operating without the one person who could clarify what he meant or what he wanted. He hasn’t met them negotiating with a spouse who is now the sole legal owner of everything, trying to figure out how to advocate for themselves without causing a rift.

Research backs this up in a way that surprises most people. Estate attorneys report that more than half of the disputes they see involve items that represent less than ten percent of the estate’s total value. Not the money. The stuff. The lamp. The jewellery. The photograph albums. The things that have no market value and enormous emotional weight.

Those disputes aren’t about greed. They’re about what the object means, and about old dynamics that were manageable when the parent was alive and become unmanageable when they’re not.

Marcel’s kids might be fine. Plenty of families navigate this well. But “I know my kids” isn’t a plan. It’s a hope. And hope isn’t the same thing as having the conversation.

When Sylvie’s father passed away

Sylvie and her three brothers had always gotten along. Their father was confident they’d divide things fairly, and he said so often. What he never said was who should get his coin collection, or the fishing gear, or the hand-built bookshelf that had been in his study for forty years. Within six weeks of his death, Sylvie had stopped speaking to her oldest brother. Not over money. Over the bookshelf. It was not about the bookshelf.

“If she wants to deal with it, that’s up to her.”

This one sounds like generosity. It isn’t.

When Marcel’s will passes everything to his spouse, she becomes the legal owner of everything in that estate. Every piece of furniture. Every tool. Every item with sentimental value to one or more of his five children. What she does with those things is entirely up to her. She has no legal obligation to honour anything Marcel said out loud, any promises made at the kitchen table, any understanding his children may have about what was meant for them.

She may handle it beautifully. She may distribute things exactly as Marcel would have wanted. But Marcel has given her that task with no roadmap, no expressed wishes on record, and a family that includes members who may find it hard to advocate for themselves without feeling like they’re creating conflict.

That’s not a small thing. That’s a significant amount of pressure placed on one person, at one of the hardest moments of her life, with five different sets of expectations she may or may not know about.

“She can deal with it” assumes she knows what to do. It assumes she knows what Marcel would have wanted. It assumes the children will trust her judgment and accept the outcome. Those are a lot of assumptions for a plan that has nothing written down.

What Marcel Could Do Instead

None of this requires a lawyer, though updating a will to include specific bequests of personal property is worth discussing with one. What it requires is a willingness to have the conversation while he still can.

That conversation doesn’t have to be formal or a big deal. It can start with something as simple as walking through the house and making note of what matters and who it matters to. It can include a written record of his wishes, even an informal one, so that his spouse and his children have something to refer to. It can include a direct conversation with his kids about what he wants for them and what he’s hoping they’ll do for each other.

The goal isn’t to predict every conflict. It’s to remove as many ambiguities as possible, so the people he loves aren’t left filling in the blanks under the worst possible circumstances.

If you’re not sure where to start, The Prepared Estate™ brings together two tools designed for exactly this stage of planning. Estate Architect™ walks you through the decisions that shape your estate plan, and In Plain Sight™ helps you organize and document the personal records, accounts, and assets your family will need to find. Together, they give your executor, your spouse, and your children something to work with. You can find it at https://agapimarketing.com/planning-toolkit/

Marcel isn’t a bad planner. He’s a very common one. He’s done enough to feel like he’s handled it, without quite doing enough to actually handle it. That gap is where most estate problems live.

The good news is that gap is entirely closeable. But only while he’s still here to close it.

Visit our services page to see how we can help.

Watch our video here, or watch on our YouTube Channel:

Prefer a podcast? Listen here!

Please send us your questions or share your comments.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

YouTube
YouTube
LinkedIn
LinkedIn
Facebook
Twitter