Why you've been avoiding this
The reason it sits at the bottom of every list, and the hour it actually takes once you start.
In progress4 min↓ 571 words
§ Journey
The reason it sits at the bottom of every list, and the hour it actually takes once you start.
The first time I sat down to draft my will, I was 38 and my second child was four months old. I made it twenty minutes in before I closed the laptop and went to put the kettle on. Then I didn't open the laptop again for fourteen months.
I'm not unusual. Roughly 60-70 percent of Australian fathers under 50 don't have a current will.
This module is about why. And about the hour it actually takes once you start.
The honest answer is that filling out a will is the closest most men come to writing about their own death in plain prose. You name the date you're imagining (your death). You name the people you'd leave behind. You name the things they'd inherit. It is unsettling in a way that feels physical.
So men don't.
They tell themselves a story instead:
Each story is a way of pulling the bedsheet over the bigger one underneath.
A clean estate plan for a man in his thirties or forties takes about an hour of focused work. Not one sitting necessarily. Maybe four blocks of fifteen minutes:
Sixty minutes. The will needs witnessing, often a coffee shop and two friends.
You will spend longer than that thinking about whether to mow the lawn this weekend.
Three reasons sharpen the timing.
The first is the sudden-event problem. Without a will, your family enters intestacy. Spouse and kids share the estate on a fixed split, the house gets dragged through probate, and your partner can spend three to nine months locked out of joint money.
The second is the executor problem. If you don't name an executor, the court appoints one. The first month of administering an estate without instructions is a man with a torch in someone else's basement.
The third is the guardian problem. If both parents die without a will, the family court decides who raises your kids. The decision can take a year. A will names the guardians in two lines.
Six modules. Roughly an hour of reading, an hour of paperwork, and you're done for the next five years.
You don't need to do them in one sitting. You do need to do them.
Sit down. Open the laptop. DON'T close it again.
A blunt field guide to the first month after the conversation. Sleep, paperwork, the kids, and the part nobody warns you about.
5 minHow to start the talk you've been rehearsing in the shower for six months. A practical guide to the words, the room, the aftermath.
4 minWhen she ends it and you didn't see it coming. The first 72 hours, the stories you'll tell yourself, and what to actually do.
4 minA self-interrogation guide for the man considering ending his marriage. Not advice. Questions. The hard ones, in order.
5 min