Understanding Wills and Estate Planning

As we don't yet have a will, I have been reading this book, which is a simple guide to this topic with plenty of examples. I now see that there is more to estate planning in Australia than I thought. There are no inheritance taxes in Australia, so I thought that "estate planning" wasn't a big deal here. But after reading the book I now see that you might want to design things to prevent various scenarios occurring, and yes there are some tax issues, and then there are all the issues of making sure your wishes are carried out.

For example, in the case of my mother, after she lost the ability to make decisions, we ended up being dictated to by the government about how we managed her money etc. We had to sell all her financial assets and reinvest them in an approved way. We had a power of attorney to act on her behalf, but crazily this became invalid when she most needed us to act on her behalf! This was because prior to 2017 apparently you couldn't have an enduring power of attorney in her country. So, it is important to set up an enduring power of attorney.

I aspire that my children will inherit in real terms at least as much as I inherited from my parents. Of course, we can't guarantee this as who knows what might happen to the economy etc. But we can try to prevent some adverse events happening. An example is if one of us dies and the other gets a new partner. Then they die and the partner inherits everything and decides to give none of the money in their will to our children.  Maybe because they have existing children and rewrite their will to include only them.... This kind of case is mentioned in the book but the solution isn't provided. On p58 it says that the survivor should see a lawyer before remarrying...

I am thinking the solution is to set up a testamentary trust on the death of the first spouse incorporating their share of the total assets. The beneficiaries would be the surviving spouse and the children. The surviving spouse will earn income from the trust during the remainder of their life after which the children will be the sole beneficiaries of the trust. So, clearly, we are going to need to discuss with a lawyer all of this.

Currently, if our nuclear family all died, it would be my mother-in-law who would inherit everything according to Australian law. I can't imagine she would handle that very well and given the large inheritance component from my parents, that hardly seems fair. So, we also need to have contingent inheritors to result in a more reasonable distribution of assets in that extreme case.

We also will need to think about who would be a guardian for our children if we both died. I can't really think of someone here in Australia that we would want to do this and who would agree to it as neither of us have relatives here. But it is something we are going to have to determine.

There are probably lots of things I still haven't considered but I think we are going to need to have rough ideas about all of these before meeting a lawyer. By the way, if anyone can recommend a lawyer that they have used, that would be great!