The second most grown up thing I've done

In recent weeks @bozz has written about his plan to write his will, and today I came across @kerrislravenhill writing about the same topic. Then I found out that this week's Ladies of Hive contest is about writing your will. That got me thinking about my own situation.

In the past, I always thought writing a will isn't an important thing to do, especially when we were young(ish) and didn't have a lot of assets. Plus the fact we don't have any kids. Even if we did, by default everything would go to him/her/them. And we were moving around quite a bit in the past decade, it didn't make sense to write a will when things were so fluid.

Now we've finally settled down and got our affairs in order, we thought the timing was right. It was probably the second
most grown up thing we've done after buying our house. But to me, it was also a sign that I am getting nearer to one end of life than the other. Kinda sad to face up to this reality.

Plan A

I sat down and pulled out my spreadsheet (I love them, I have one for practically everything in my life) and listed all the assets we have. I knew we had done ok in life, but what my spreadsheet told me was very comforting. Basically, it told me after living expenses, how many big and small holidays we can go every year until we drop dead at say... 90? Yeah, it's still a long long time away, even for me, but it's better to be more prudent. I don't want to forecast to live till 80, and still find myself strong and healthy with no money, and have to stay at home all the time. What fun would growing old be??!!

The next stage was to decide how to split our assets between our descendants. There are 14, and I had grouped our assets in 5 buckets. Certain assets go to some and not others, or more to some and less to others. I ended up with a 14 x 5 matrix. Took me ages to work out a fair % for each of them and I was pretty pleased with myself. I sent this to our lawyer, and I reckon she must have fell off her chair when she saw it. She didn't say it, but her response was basically an overkill for our level of assets 😅. It was doable, but it would make ours a complex will, costing a lot more money. Plus, if in future years we divest a certain bucket of asset, we would have to update our will again if we wanted a fair share for everyone.

Plan B

Our lawyer suggested a simple solution, to keep all our assets as a single bucket and carve the cake there. Fair suggestion, no point complicating things. If we have a good remaining life, there could only be crumbs leftover 😄

I haven't done anything about funerals or power of attorney yet. That would make things too real. One step at time.