The Last Plan You Make for the People You Love

A few months ago, a client told me she thought her affairs were “sorted”. She had a will drawn up when she got married, and had been contributing to a retirement annuity since her twenties. It was only when we sat down together that we found her ex-husband was still listed as the primary beneficiary on that RA, years after their divorce.

Nothing about her will was wrong. It just wasn’t the whole picture anymore.

That’s usually how estate planning goes wrong. Not because people don’t care, but because life moves on and paperwork doesn’t always move with it.

What actually needs to be in place

A few things tend to matter most, and none of them are complicated on their own.

The first is a valid, current will. Not just a will, a current one, reviewed every few years or whenever something in your life changes materially, like marriage, divorce, or welcoming a new member to the family.

The second is making sure your beneficiary nominations actually match your will. This is the one that catches even well-advised clients out. Nominations on retirement annuities or life policies sit outside your will entirely. If they haven’t been updated, they take precedence over whatever your will says, regardless of what you actually intended.

The third is guardianship, if you have children still at school or who are minors. A will is where you name a guardian and set out your wishes for their upbringing. Without it, that decision is left to a court, at a time when your family can least afford the uncertainty.

The fourth is liquidity, and this is where real numbers help make an abstract point concrete. Every estate gets a R3.5 million abatement before estate duty applies (R7 million for a couple, where the first-dying spouse’s abatement wasn’t already used elsewhere). Above that, estate duty is levied at 20% up to R30 million, and 25% on anything above that. Without cash or realisable assets set aside to cover duty, executor’s fees and other costs, families sometimes have to sell a property or a business at exactly the wrong time, just to settle the estate.

It’s worth knowing that retirement annuities and life policies aren’t treated the same way here. Retirement annuity, pension and provident fund death benefits fall outside the dutiable estate entirely, the fund’s trustees decide how to allocate the benefit among your dependants, using your nomination as guidance rather than a binding instruction. Life policies work differently: if you owned the policy and paid the premiums, the proceeds are normally still included in your dutiable estate, even though they’re paid directly to whoever you’ve nominated, unless that person is your surviving spouse, in which case the proceeds are fully deductible from estate duty. So who you name as a beneficiary on a life policy doesn’t just decide who inherits, it can genuinely change how much duty your estate pays.

Where I see it go wrong

The pattern I come across most isn’t neglect, it’s intentions that quietly went out of date. A will drawn up before a divorce and never revisited. A beneficiary nomination filled in on a form fifteen years ago and never looked at again. None of this is anyone’s fault, really. Life is the kind of thing that keeps happening, and paperwork doesn’t update itself.

Why this actually matters

Strip away the legal language, and the real point of all this is simple: the people you love shouldn’t have to spend the hardest months of their lives untangling admin that could have been sorted while you were still here to do it.

That’s the actual benefit of estate planning. Not the will itself, but what it spares your family from: uncertainty, delay, and the quiet stress of a system that’s hard enough to navigate at the best of times, let alone while grieving. Wealth you’ve worked a lifetime to build only does what you intended if the plan around it still holds together when it’s needed.

Where to start

You don’t need to overhaul anything this week. A good starting point is simply this: pull out your will and check the date on it. Then check who’s named as beneficiary on your retirement funds and life policies, and ask yourself honestly whether that still reflects your life today.

If it doesn’t, that’s not a failure. It’s just information, and it’s exactly the kind of thing we can work through together at your next review.

This article is for general information purposes only and doesn’t constitute legal, tax or financial advice specific to your circumstances. Estate duty rates and thresholds referenced are correct as at September 2026, sourced from SARS, and are subject to change. Please speak to your wealth manager directly before acting on anything above.