Why you've been avoiding this

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.

Why this is at the bottom of every list

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:

• "I'm not old enough yet." (Statistically a third of men who die before 60 die suddenly.)
• "We don't have enough for it to matter." (You do. A house, a super balance, a life insurance policy and a car together are usually $500k to $2m of estate.)
• "She'd sort it out." (With six months of legal fees, intestacy rules, and a process that locks accounts for weeks.)
• "I'll do it when the kids are older." (The legal exposure is widest precisely while they're young.)

Each story is a way of pulling the bedsheet over the bigger one underneath.

What the hour actually looks like

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:

• 15 minutes: list what you own and what you owe.
• 15 minutes: decide who gets what, who the executor is, who the guardians are.
• 15 minutes: fill in the will plus the EPOA and ACD forms.
• 15 minutes: log into super and life insurance, fix the binding death benefit nominations.

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.

Why now, not later

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.

What this Journey covers

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.

Further watching

• 5 Estate Planning Mistakes that are Costing Australians Thousands
• Wills Explained for Australians