Your legacy plan decides who is going to pay

BY 2029, private wealth in Asia is projected to reach US$99 trillion and more than six in 10 of the region’s wealthy will be at least 60 years old, according to a 2025 report by UOB Private Bank, Boston Consulting Group and the National University of Singapore Business School.

Singapore sits at the centre of this transition. By 2030, one in four Singaporeans will be over 65.

Yet, the typical legacy plan in many Singapore homes is this: There’s a will somewhere, a flat in joint ownership, and a Central Provident Fund (CPF) nomination to one’s spouse.

The challenge is that these documents do not necessarily work together to produce a coherent legacy plan.

Proper estate planning is not about ticking boxes. It is about whether what you have put in place honours your intentions, values and the people you care about. When there is a gap between your intentions and your arrangements, someone eventually bears the consequences.

The document is not the plan

Most people believe that a will puts their affairs in order. But a will only deals with assets that fall within your estate, and only after death. It does nothing should you suffer dementia or fall into a coma, where you live but are unable to act for yourself.

That requires other instruments, such as a Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA), Advance Care Plan or an Advance Medical Directive.

The LPA illustrates why completing a document is not the same as planning. LPA Form 1 is now easy to complete online. Since April 2026, it has been free for all Singaporeans. Yet, only about one in seven citizens has an LPA.

Without an LPA, should you lose mental capacity, your family would have to apply to court for a deputyship order, which can cost thousands of dollars and take six to 12 months.

Even making an LPA is not enough if you do not understand the choices behind it: Who should your donee be? When might Form 1’s broad powers be insufficient? Have you actually completed the registration?

I have seen families discover too late that a relative had gone through certification by a doctor, but did not complete the separate registration with the Office of the Public Guardian. Despite their best intentions, the LPA never came into force.

When your instruments contradict each other

A carefully drafted will may still be undermined by everything sitting outside it. CPF savings follow your CPF nomination, and not your will. Insurance nominations similarly sit outside the will. Jointly held assets may pass automatically to the surviving joint owner.

One quirk often catches people off guard. Marriage automatically revokes your will and CPF nomination. However, divorce does not revoke your will, CPF or insurance nominations.

I once worked with a divorced client on her will and trust. As we reviewed her nominations, she realised to her horror that one plan still retained an irrevocable nomination to her ex-husband. They had not spoken since the divorce.

She reached out to him through a mutual friend, and he agreed to the revocation. Had we not checked, the outcome might have been very different.

Property creates similar blind spots. You may write in your will that your share of a flat should go to your children. But if the property is held in joint tenancy, your interest generally passes to the surviving joint owner instead. There may be nothing for your will to distribute.

The lesson here is simple. Your will, nominations, ownership structures and other arrangements need to be reviewed as one system, and not as separate pieces of paperwork.

Equal is not always fair

How you divide your assets deserves equally careful thought.

Consider a child who set aside career opportunities and years of personal life to care for an ageing parent, while their siblings did not. Should that sacrifice be recognised? Or a child with special needs who will require financial support for life, compared with siblings capable of supporting themselves independently.

There is no universal answer here. But fairness must be designed into an estate plan. Fairness doesn’t occur just because we divided everything equally.

When a gift sabotages

Even a generous inheritance can work against the person receiving it.

Imagine handing S$1 million outright to a 21-year-old still in school, financially inexperienced and susceptible to influence. Is that a gift or a hazard?

The Straits Times once reported on the widow of a worker killed at Changi Airport who received close to S$1 million in insurance and donations.

She was advised to set aside S$200,000 for each of her four children. But her brother persuaded her to invest in his startup. Relatives borrowed and did not repay. Within a year, the money was gone, with too little left for her children’s education.

Financial immaturity is only one risk. An inheritance may later become exposed to matrimonial claims in a divorce, creditor problems or increasingly sophisticated scams. A large lump sum sitting directly in a beneficiary’s hands carries risks regardless of how sensible that person is today.

The objective is not simply to give. It is to give with enough structure that the gift continues to serve the purpose you intended.

Trusts are not just for the wealthy

This is where trusts are often misunderstood. A trust is not fundamentally about distributing vast sums of money. It is a safeguard that can determine who receives money, when they receive it and under what circumstances.

It can help protect an inheritance from a beneficiary’s inexperience, and risks such as divorce, creditors and scams. Because trusts operate outside probate, they can also make funds available to families without waiting for the estate administration process.

And they are more accessible than many assume. A standby trust can be established during your lifetime but remain dormant until triggered by death or loss of capacity. Insurance and CPF monies can also be structured for staged distributions rather than simply arriving as one lump sum.

Had the Changi widow’s S$200,000 for each child been held under an appropriate trust structure with staged releases, those funds could have remained protected for their intended purpose.

A legacy is more than money

A will also says nothing about what your family should do in the days after you die. Where are your assets? Who should they contact? Where is your will? What kind of funeral would you want?

A schedule of assets helps your executor know what exists rather than forcing your family to piece together your financial life after you are gone.

The rest can be deeply personal. When marathoner Eugene Lim died of cancer earlier this year at 45, his send-off reflected who he was: bright colours rather than black and white, and a celebration rather than a solemn wake, as he had wanted.

Singapore gives us many tools to plan well: no estate duty, capital gains or gift tax; established trust laws; the LPA; the Wills Registry; and My Legacy, where individuals can record funeral preferences and give trusted people access to important information.

The tools to secure our legacy already exist. The harder work is deciding what you want them to achieve.

Every family already has an estate plan of some kind. The question is whether it is one you deliberately shaped, or one created by defaults, outdated decisions and disconnected documents.

Life transitions inevitably carry a cost. We can invest some of it upfront, through planning, appropriate structures and sometimes difficult conversations. Or, leave our loved ones to bear it later through confusion, delays, legal expenses or conflict.

While we are well enough to make choices, the decision is ours.

The writer is associate director, finexis advisory