The Straits Times · Tan Ooi Boon, Invest Editor · 23 August 2020
Without a will, a family can break up before the money is even counted
A couple with two young children were killed in an accident. They had no will, so the question of who would raise their children had no answer, and the relatives did not agree on one.
What happened
The case is one the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners has encountered. Both parents died at once. Because there was no will, guardianship of the two children was left in limbo. The children were minors, so they could not even get someone to apply for a court order to have their parents' assets and savings properly transferred or used to look after them. Members of the dead couple's family did not see eye to eye on who should take the children in. In that situation children can end up being moved from one home to another.
What the survey found
The same association surveyed adults here on how prepared they are for end-of-life matters. 56 per cent of adult Singaporeans had no will, close to the CPF Board's own figure that about 60 per cent of eligible members have not nominated anyone for their CPF money. Among those who had made a will, only 14 per cent had one that was up to date. Only a quarter of Singaporeans with young children had nominated a guardian, and about 66 per cent of the wills made by parents said nothing at all about guardianship. Only 10 per cent of adults polled had a Lasting Power of Attorney, and around 30 per cent of those were unsure when it would even come into force.
The line worth keeping
STEP Singapore chairman Sim Bock Eng, who heads WongPartnership's specialist and private client disputes practice, put it this way: "Just as we rush to purchase an endowment or education policy with the birth of each child, we should think about our own 'succession' with each milestone in our life."
What we do about it
A guardian clause is not an add-on. It is the first thing we ask about when there are young children. We name a guardian, a backup guardian, and we make the money available to whoever is actually raising the children rather than locking it up until they turn 21. We also ask you to speak to the person you are naming, because a guardian who is surprised by the appointment is the one most likely to decline it.
Summarised from reporting in The Straits Times. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
The Business Times · Grace Tay · 2 September 2026
Your legacy plan decides who is going to pay
A will, a flat in joint names and a CPF nomination is what most Singapore households call a plan. The documents are real. They just do not necessarily work together.
The document is not the plan
A will only deals with assets that fall inside your estate, and only after death. It does nothing if you are alive but can no longer act for yourself, whether through dementia, a stroke or a coma. That needs other instruments: a Lasting Power of Attorney, an Advance Care Plan, an Advance Medical Directive. LPA Form 1 has been free for all Singaporeans since April 2026 and can be completed online, yet only about one in seven citizens has one. Without it, a family that needs to act for you has to apply to court for a deputyship order, which can cost thousands of dollars and take six to 12 months.
Finishing the form is not finishing the job
The report describes families who discovered too late that a relative had been certified by a doctor but had never completed the separate registration with the Office of the Public Guardian. The LPA never came into force. Everything they had done counted for nothing at the moment it was needed.
When your documents contradict each other
CPF savings follow your CPF nomination, not your will. Insurance nominations sit outside the will too. Jointly held assets can pass automatically to the surviving joint owner, which means a clause in your will giving your share of a flat to your children may have nothing left to operate on. And one quirk catches people constantly: marriage automatically revokes your will and your CPF nomination, while divorce revokes none of them. The writer describes a divorced client who found, mid-review, that one policy still carried an irrevocable nomination to her ex-husband. They had not spoken since the divorce.
Equal is not always fair
A child who set aside a career to care for an ageing parent, or a child with special needs who will need support for life, is not in the same position as a sibling who is independent. Fairness has to be designed into the plan. It does not arrive by dividing everything into equal parts.
When the gift itself does harm
The article cites a Straits Times report on the widow of a worker killed at Changi Airport, who received close to $1 million in insurance and donations. She was advised to set aside $200,000 for each of her four children. Her brother persuaded her to put money into his startup instead, and relatives borrowed and did not repay. Within a year the money was gone. Handing a large sum outright to someone young, inexperienced or under pressure is not automatically a kindness.
What we do about it
We read the will, the CPF nomination, the insurance nominations and the property title together, as one system, because that is how they will be read after you die. And where an outright gift would put a beneficiary at risk, we stage it.
Summarised from a commentary published in The Business Times, 2 September 2026. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
Wills Registry, Singapore Academy of Law · Andrew Wong, Advocate and Solicitor, Fors Law Corporation · 31 July 2023
I want to make a will. Where do I start?
A plain-English walk through the decisions that have to be made before a single clause is drafted.
Who are your beneficiaries
Non-Muslims in Singapore have testamentary freedom and may decide who inherits: a spouse, children, grandchildren, a partner, friends, a charity or a religious institution. There is no forced heirship, so you are not obliged to leave anything to your next of kin. Without a will, the estate is distributed under the default rules in the Intestate Succession Act 1967, with no regard to your circumstances or preferences. A typical will has specific bequests, and almost always a residuary clause pooling the balance and sharing it in stated proportions.
Who is your executor
A will does not execute itself. The executor must be at least 21 at the time of executing the will and not an undischarged bankrupt. It is recommended that the executor is resident in Singapore, because the job means applying for the Grant of Probate, then visiting banks to close accounts, and selling or transferring property. A beneficiary is allowed to be the executor.
What a will does not reach
CPF monies do not form part of your estate. Where a CPF nomination exists, that money is paid to the nominated beneficiaries and falls outside the will entirely. Insurance policies with nominations work the same way. A property held in joint tenancy passes to the surviving joint tenant by survivorship, so it is not distributed under your will unless you are the last surviving joint tenant.
If a beneficiary is still a child
Where there are minor beneficiaries, the article strongly recommends building a testamentary trust into the will, appointing a trustee to hold the assets for them until they reach 21.
Probate, or letters of administration
Administering an estate is smoother and more cost-efficient with a will, when the application is for a Grant of Probate, than without one, when it is an application for Letters of Administration.
Why it sits on this page
This is the clearest short account we have read of the decisions we take you through at the first meeting. The article is written by a practising lawyer and is for information, not legal advice.
Summarised from an article published by the Wills Registry of the Singapore Academy of Law, 31 July 2023. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
The Straits Times · Chor Khieng Yuit, Senior Business Correspondent · 20 August 2022
Nearly half of those polled had no will, and the procedure was never the hard part
A survey of 680 Singaporeans aged 45 to 64 found 48 per cent had no will, and 63 per cent said they did not understand how to pass wealth down to the next generation.
What the survey found
Wealth manager St James's Place Singapore polled 680 Singaporeans between the ages of 45 and 64 in February 2022. Forty-eight per cent did not have a will. Sixty-three per cent said they lacked understanding of how to manage the passing down of generational wealth. The article notes the proportion of millionaires in Singapore was projected to rise to 13.4 per cent by 2030, from 7.5 per cent the year before.
It is not a cost problem
Associate professor of finance (education) Mandy Tham at the Singapore Management University points out that almost everyone has some financial assets, savings, a house, perhaps shares, that they want to pass on. On what a will takes: "A will does not take a lot of time to set up. It costs maybe $200 or $300."
What happens if you do not
When someone dies without a will in Singapore, intestacy laws apply and a government-appointed administrator distributes the assets to the next of kin. The article describes that process as time-consuming and expensive for the family, and one that can lead to long-lasting family feuds.
Why it sits on this page
Gary Harvey, chief executive of St James's Place Singapore, makes the point that a will is especially useful for parents of young children, because it lets them nominate a guardian to take care of the children's needs if they die before the children are financially independent.
What we do about it
We keep the first conversation about your circumstances rather than about products, because the survey finding that matters here is the second one: not that people refuse to make a will, but that they are unsure how any of it fits together.
Summarised from reporting in The Straits Times, 20 August 2022. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
CNA · 6 December 2023
Three sisters sued their younger brother over their father's shop, and won equal shares
The property was in the son's name, and he said he was its sole and absolute owner. The High Court held it was held in equal shares for all four siblings, and ordered him to pay $149,000 in costs.
What happened
The family patriarch was the sole proprietor of a hardware business that operated from a property in Veerasamy Road from 1985 until his death. Until 1995 the premises were leased from HDB a year at a time. In 1995 HDB offered to sell an 89-year lease of the property at a discounted price of $403,400 under its Sale of Tenanted Shops Scheme. The father accepted, and in September 1995 executed the loan, security and conveyancing documents together with his only son, who was a co-borrower on the DBS loan.
Who actually paid
While he was alive the father paid entirely for the upkeep and maintenance of the property, and paid his son no rent for occupying it. He finished repaying the DBS loan in May 2016 and died several months later, in December 2016. His wife took over the business and ran it from the property with the help of two of her daughters until her own death in August 2017. She left a will dividing her estate equally among her children.
What the court decided
When the three older sisters asked whether the net sale proceeds would be shared equally among the four siblings, their brother said he was the sole and absolute owner. Justice Coomaraswamy found otherwise: "I find that both parents did not favour the defendant, as their only son, over their daughters as may have been typical for parents of their generation and culture." The property was held in equal shares for the four siblings. The judge made orders for the event that the sisters wish to buy out their brother's 25 per cent beneficial interest, and ordered him to pay their costs of $149,000.
Why this is the common one
Putting an adult child's name on a title is normally done for a practical reason, such as a loan, a scheme or plain convenience, and almost never with a document saying what it means. Years later the registered name tells one story and the money tells another, and the family pays a lawyer to argue about which one wins. A paragraph written at the time would have ended it.
What we do about it
We read the title before drafting a line of your will. Where a property sits in a name that does not match who paid or who is meant to benefit, we record the intention in writing while everyone who knows the truth is still alive to confirm it.
Summarised from reporting by CNA, 6 December 2023. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
The Straits Times · Selina Lum · 22 June 2026
Brother against brother over a $9 million family home
The eldest of eight children said he and his wife had bought the family house outright in 1992. The High Court found no documentary evidence of any such agreement, and concluded the story of how they had raised the money was fabricated.
What happened
The property, in Eunos and valued at $9 million, was solely owned by the mother after the father's death in 1992. The other siblings moved out. The eldest son, Lim Sze Eng, 72, continued to live there with his wife, children and grandchildren. In 2008 he took their mother, Tan Ah Kar, to a lawyer's office, where she signed a document transferring 50 per cent of the house to him and his wife. In 2012 she willed her remaining half-share to her youngest son, Lin Tze Kin, 61, and his two sons.
The dispute
After the mother died in 2023, Sze Eng demanded that Tze Kin transfer the half-share to him, claiming that he and his wife had bought the entire property for $570,000 in 1992. Tze Kin and his wife sued to assert a claim on the half-share, and on the mother's share of proceeds from two shop units at Far East Plaza that Sze Eng had kept. Both couples were parties to the case.
What the court decided
In a written judgment on 16 June, High Court judge Audrey Lim rejected the claim: "There is no documentary evidence to support the existence of the agreement or that the defendants paid, out of their own monies, $570,000 for the property pursuant to the purported agreement." The judge also concluded that the defendants had fabricated the account of how they raised the money, which was said to have come from selling two properties in Taiwan to discharge an overdraft secured on the house. There was no written record of the agreement.
What this one is really about
Two transfers, fourteen years apart, both perfectly lawful, and neither accompanied by a note explaining why. A half-share that moved in 2008 and a will made in 2012 pointed in opposite directions, and the family found out in court which one the law would follow.
What we do about it
When a share of a property moves between family members, we record the reason at the time. If a transfer is meant as a gift, we say so. If it is meant to be held for everyone, we say that instead. It costs an afternoon. The alternative costs a house.
Summarised from reporting in The Straits Times, 22 June 2026. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
The Straits Times · Tan Ooi Boon, Invest Editor · 23 August 2026
An estate frozen for seven years by a marriage the family never knew about
He died without a will. The person named as his spouse had priority over his estate, and she had vanished years earlier. His mother lived in the flat and could do nothing with it.
What happened
A 45-year-old man entered a fake marriage in 2013, after he was promised a lump sum of $3,000 and $400 a month. The payments stopped, his wife became unreachable, and he told his siblings the truth over a family dinner before making a police report. He died four years later, in 2017, without leaving a will.
Why his mother was stuck
Because there was no will, the person named as his spouse had priority in dealing with the estate. She could not be found, and half the property could have gone to her if there were a dispute. His 74-year-old mother, who lived in the HDB flat, was left in limbo for seven years.
How it ended
In 2022 the mother applied for a court order declaring the marriage void. She and three of her other children filed statements saying they had never met the wife, had never been invited to a wedding, could find no photographs of the couple, and did not know who the two witnesses to the marriage were. Given the exceptional circumstances the High Court granted the order on public policy grounds, so that the wife could not claim his assets. The report notes at least two other Singapore cases involving the estates of men who had entered fake marriages.
The line the report ends on
Make proper legacy planning if you want to benefit only your chosen beneficiaries, whatever your marital status.
What we do about it
We ask who the law would treat as your family, not who you would name in conversation, because those are not always the same people. Where that answer is complicated, we write the will so that it says who inherits rather than leaving the Intestate Succession Act to decide it for you.
Summarised from reporting in The Straits Times, 23 August 2026. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
The Straits Times · Tan Ooi Boon · 7 June 2026
A daughter evicted, a wealthy family divided: the ten-lawsuit saga
The couple were astute in using legal structures to protect their assets. It did not stop their two children from being drawn into about ten legal disputes, with each other and with their parents.
What happened
The family had set up a company to hold the patriarch's properties and other assets. The size of the family's wealth was not disclosed. High Court Judge Christopher Tan observed: "The dynamics between the family members in this case were atypical, in that they often resorted to litigation to resolve their differences."
It started with the father
It was the patriarch who sued first, when his two children seemingly misused the family's properties. At his behest the family company sued his son in 2003 over his use of an apartment at Ardmore Park where he was living. The company sought to evict him and to make him account for the unit's rental income. The action was discontinued the following year after father and son made peace. In 2014 it was the daughter's turn. Her father sued her because she had taken out a mortgage on her property in Tanjong Rhu to finance her son's business. The property was in her name, but the patriarch objected to the mortgage.
The lesson the report draws
Structure alone does not prevent a fight. Most disputes start once the heads of the family have died or lost mental capacity, which is exactly when nobody is left to say what was intended. If parents are open and frank about the legacy plan while they are still around, there are fewer opportunities for anyone to make trouble later, because it is much harder to challenge a plan everyone in the room already knew about.
What we do about it
A shareholding is an asset like any other, and it interacts with your shareholders' agreement, which can override what your will says. We read both together. And where a business is going to one child and not another, we would rather you tell them yourself, in a room, than have them read it for the first time after the funeral.
Summarised from reporting in The Straits Times, 7 June 2026. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
The Straits Times · Tan Ooi Boon, Invest Editor · 9 June 2024
When siblings inherit property in equal shares and still end up fighting
Four siblings squabbled over two shophouses worth $5 million after their father died without a will. An equal split settled nothing. It gave four people a veto over the same building.
What the report says
Four siblings squabble over two shophouses worth $5 million when their father dies without a will. The article's advice to parents is blunt: you should be able to command the respect of your beneficiaries, otherwise things can spiral out of control and end in a mess.
Why an equal split is not a clean split
This part is our own observation, and we see it often. When someone dies without a will, the Intestate Succession Act divides the ownership of an asset, not the asset itself. Four children each own a quarter of a shophouse. To sell it, all four have to agree: on whether to sell at all, on the price, on the agent, on the timing. One sibling who wants to keep it, or who lives in it, or who simply will not answer the phone, stops the other three. The only way out is to go to court to force a sale, which takes time and comes out of the same $5 million.
What we do about it
Where an estate contains property that cannot be cut into pieces, we do not leave the division to arithmetic. We name who takes the building and how the others are made whole, or we give the executor a clear power of sale and a mechanism for one sibling to buy the others out. It is a harder conversation to have while you are alive. It is a far cheaper one.
Summarised from reporting in The Straits Times, 9 June 2024. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
The Straits Times · Tan Ooi Boon · 23 August 2026
When couples split on paper to keep money away from creditors
The spouse who owes money generously gives up his claim to the marital assets, so the creditors cannot reach what the other spouse holds. Every transfer leaves a paper trail.
The generous husband
A husband transferred a chunk of his savings and his share in four condominiums to his wife when they filed for divorce, and agreed to pay the mortgage and $2,000 a month in child maintenance even though he would be penniless afterwards. His former wife then took over $7 million from the sale of three of the units. The couple carried on living together in their remaining $5 million home in the Orchard Road area, and she kept $3 million in cash at home. The creditors obtained a worldwide injunction freezing her assets. The High Court held that the divorce did not stop the debtor being sued, particularly where he had voluntarily impoverished himself by giving everything away.
The property sold before the divorce
A wife filed for divorce barely a month before bankruptcy action was started against her husband. They agreed to part by mutual consent, with her keeping the proceeds of their apartment. She had in fact already sold it and pocketed more than $800,000 before the divorce hearing, and the pair hid that during the proceedings. The court dismissed her attempt to stop the creditors, describing her conduct as a deception intended to mislead the court into granting the divorce order.
A court order is not a shield
A third couple divorced shortly after the husband was sued and before he was declared bankrupt, under an order transferring his interest in two properties to his wife. The High Court found the transfer was a ploy to avoid the debt. The Court of Appeal rejected her appeal, since allowing it would let non-genuine private transfers escape creditors simply because a court had approved them.
Why it sits on this page
A business owner rarely holds assets in one clean name. Shares, a property in a spouse's name, a loan personally guaranteed: these are the things that decide what is actually yours to leave, and they are the first things a creditor will test.
What we do about it
We ask what is genuinely in your name and what is not, before drafting, so the will does not try to give away something that was never yours to give. Where a debt, a guarantee or a dispute is live, that is a matter for a lawyer, and we say so.
Summarised from reporting in The Straits Times, 23 August 2026. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
Wills Registry, Singapore Academy of Law · Sharifah Nabilah Binte Syed Omar, Advocate and Solicitor, Luo Ling Ling LLC · 31 July 2023
The pros and cons of a do-it-yourself will
An even-handed account of what a DIY will saves you, and the seven ways it is known to fail.
What a DIY will gets you
Two real advantages, and the article states them plainly: it is cheaper, because no lawyer is engaged, and it is convenient, because you can draft and execute it at home at any time without an appointment.
Where they fail
The article sets out seven risks. Online templates do not organise complex assets or unusual family dynamics, such as whether a jointly owned property can be included at all, whether an estranged biological child can be excluded, or how to properly revoke an earlier will. A DIY will may contain errors and contradictory clauses that leave it incoherent or invalid. Imprecise language creates loopholes, and executors may have to seek a court declaration on what the will means, at a cost and delay that proper drafting would have avoided. Without a lawyer's checks, manipulation or pressure on the person making the will can go undetected, and a will that is not securely stored can be destroyed or altered. Templates rarely cover the unforeseen: a testator and beneficiary dying together, a beneficiary dying first, or beneficiaries who are still minors. A will that reads well can still be invalid if it is not executed correctly under Singapore law. And a template cannot advise whether a no-contest clause would be appropriate.
What makes a will valid in Singapore
The article lists the general requirements. The will must be in writing. The person making it must be at least 21 and of sound mind. It must be signed by the testator at the foot of the will. It must be witnessed and signed by at least two witnesses present at the same time. Those two witnesses must not be beneficiaries.
Is a DIY will suitable for you
The article's own answer: DIY wills are less viable for people with complicated assets and unique family dynamics. The cost saving is appealing, but a defective will can mean the estate is not distributed as intended, and inadequate wording can lead to protracted disputes between beneficiaries and family members.
What we do about it
We supervise the signing and witnessing, which is the step that quietly invalidates the most home-made wills, and we ask you to register it with the Wills Registry so your family can find it. We are a will-writing practice and not a law firm, so where a question is genuinely a legal one, we say so rather than guess at it.
Summarised from an article published by the Wills Registry of the Singapore Academy of Law, 31 July 2023. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
The Straits Times · Tan Ooi Boon · 9 November 2025
Four things to know about how assets are divided when couples divorce in Singapore
Prenuptial agreements are not enforceable in Singapore. The rules sit in the Women's Charter, which empowers the courts to divide matrimonial assets in proportions that are just and equitable, and the courts have the final say.
Everything is in, unless you can prove otherwise
When a marriage is dissolved, the assets of both parties are usually treated as matrimonial assets unless a party can prove that a particular asset was not acquired during the marriage or was given as a gift or an inheritance. The burden falls on the person making that assertion. In one case a woman wanted to stake a claim on a property in her ex-husband's name and failed, because he could prove his father had given it to him before the marriage.
Non-marital assets can be transformed
Inheritance and assets acquired before the marriage are usually off-limits, unless they have been transformed and have lost their character. A woman used two adjacent houses given to her by her mother as the matrimonial home. Her then-husband, the main breadwinner, spent large sums renovating them and joining them into a single bigger home. On divorce the property went into the matrimonial pool, and he had a share of her inheritance. In another case a woman inherited a million-dollar investment account from her late father and chose to mix it with her own investment income earned during the marriage. All of it went into the pool, because the co-mingling had caused the inherited fund to lose its character.
Contributions decide the share
The courts here value both financial and non-financial contributions, so a spouse who took care of the children and the household is given due credit. A prenup saying otherwise does not change that.
Non-disclosure can undo the whole settlement
A woman discovered that her ex-husband had failed to disclose an extra $3 million during their divorce settlement. She had been awarded 44 per cent of the assets. The High Court ruled that the non-disclosure rendered the settlement invalid, and both sides had to restart the process of deciding their shares.
Why it sits on this page
Second marriages are where wills fail most often, because two sets of rules are running at once: what the family court would do with the assets, and what your will says about them. And marriage revokes a will automatically. If you remarry and do nothing, the will you carefully wrote for your children is simply gone.
Summarised from reporting in The Straits Times. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
The Straits Times · Tan Ooi Boon · 16 November 2025
How families can avoid fighting over money in joint bank accounts
Most people open a joint account for convenience, so that somebody can help manage the money. What happens to the balance afterwards depends on what a court decides you intended, and that is a question you can answer in advance or leave to your relatives.
The presumption, and who it favours
Where a joint account is between spouses, or between a parent and a child, there is an automatic presumption of advancement: the law starts from the position that the main account holder meant the money to go to the other party on death. If you are that other account holder, the presumption is worth a great deal, because the person disputing it has to produce compelling evidence to overturn it. If you are outside that relationship, as an unmarried partner or a friend, you do not get it, and a surviving account holder can have a hard time keeping the money when relatives contest it.
Husband and wife
The relatives of a childless elderly couple went to court over their joint account after both died without a will, the wife two years after the husband. The man had been the sole breadwinner, so the question was whether the money should go to his side of the family or to hers. The court ruled in favour of the wife's relatives: the presumption that he had opened the account to take care of her was not rebutted.
A woman and her partner
A woman kept a joint account with her long-time live-in boyfriend, which they used for their expenses. When she died her nephew, her only living relative and therefore her sole beneficiary because she had left no will, sued the boyfriend for the money, arguing that as they had never married it would not automatically pass to him. He lost. The court found compelling evidence that she had intended the money for her partner, including the closeness of the relationship and bank documents in which they described each other as "spouses".
An aunt and her nephew
In an Australian case, an elderly woman made her nephew a joint account holder so he could help manage her money. The money was used solely for her needs, but she told him that any balance left at her death would be his. After she died, other relatives sued claiming a share. The court ruled for the nephew, because he could prove her intention.
What we do about it
If you hold an account jointly with an unmarried partner, a friend, or a relative who is helping you, one sentence in your will settles it: either the balance is theirs, or it belongs to your estate. Without that sentence, the people who loved you get to argue about what you meant, in front of a judge, using your bank's paperwork as evidence.
Summarised from reporting in The Straits Times, 16 November 2025. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
The Straits Times · Angela Tan, Senior Business Correspondent · 25 May 2025
Transferring your wealth can be drama-free, with early planning
Your intentions may be set out clearly in your will. That is not the same as a guarantee they will be carried out.
Why wills get contested
Lawyers quoted in the piece say contests are mostly brought by children or dependants who believe they deserve a larger share than the will gives them. It can even end with someone you never intended to give a cent inheriting part of your wealth. Globally the older generation is preparing to transfer trillions of dollars to younger heirs over the next decade, and contested wills are expected to become more common in this part of the world, where discussing mortality has long been taboo.
The questions people actually ask
Christopher Tan, chief executive of the fee-only wealth advisory firm Providend, says his older business-owner clients worry about who will run the company when they are gone and whether its fair value will be captured. The questions he hears most: "How do I ensure that my loved ones will not squander the wealth left behind for them? How do I ensure that I leave them enough wealth to give them a head start in life but not take away the motivation of hard work?" Some clients want to ring-fence their assets from their children's spouses and in-laws.
It is not only for the rich
On the idea that legacy planning is something wealthy people do: "Whether one is rich or not, you will leave behind a legacy. You either leave behind a positive one or a negative one. From my experience, the wealthier one is, the more considerations one has in legacy planning."
Why it sits on this page
Second marriages, stepchildren and in-laws are where a will is most often read as an accusation rather than an instruction. Going to court to contest one is costly, and the article makes the point that in many cases the cost does not even make financial sense. The fight still happens.
What we do about it
We write the will to be read by the people who will be upset by it. Where a share is deliberately unequal we record that it was deliberate, so the document answers the question before it is asked.
Summarised from reporting in The Straits Times, 25 May 2025. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
ICLG · Rob Harkavy · 2 September 2025
A sibling battle of wills, and the question of whether their father still understood
In October 2011 he left the family bungalow to his younger daughter and cut out his other children. A year later he revoked every earlier will and left the entire estate to one son, allocating the others zero per cent. His daughter said dementia had already set in.
What happened
The testator was born in 1922, a senior civil servant, widowed in 1988, described in court as a stern and authoritarian figure in his family. He lived alone for three decades in the single-storey bungalow that made up the bulk of his estate, and lived independently until shortly before his death in March 2019 at the age of 96. He had executed several wills in his lifetime. The October 2011 will left the bungalow to his younger daughter while disinheriting the others. The November 2012 will revoked all earlier wills and left everything to his son, expressly allocating the other surviving children zero per cent. Two witnesses signed it, and both later testified.
What the court decided
The Appellate Division of the High Court upheld the earlier High Court ruling and dismissed the daughter's appeal, affirming that her father had testamentary capacity when he executed the 2012 will and that the will was valid and enforceable. It rejected the argument that he had already succumbed to dementia or Alzheimer's disease by that date. Judgment was delivered by Justice Ang Cheng Hock, sitting with Justice Debbie Ong Siew Ling and a third judge of the division. The parties were anonymised in the judgment.
Why the fight was possible at all
A will that changes course late in life, made by someone in their late eighties, is exactly the will a disappointed beneficiary will test. The son won, after years of litigation and an appeal, paid for out of the same estate everyone was arguing over.
What we do about it
When a will is made late in life, or reverses an earlier one, we build the evidence at the time rather than hoping it will be there later: independent witnesses who are not beneficiaries, a contemporaneous note of the reasons for the change, and where there is any question at all, a doctor's assessment of capacity on the day of signing. It is a small step, and it is the difference between a will that stands and a will that gets tested.
Summarised from a report published by ICLG, 2 September 2025. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
Our note on a Straits Times report · Julian Oh
Siblings fought three times in court over their mother's $1m assets
Many clients say: I don't have much. But when they pass on, or lose capacity, even $1 million can tear a family apart. Estate planning and mental incapacity planning are not about wealth size. They are about preventing family war.
No mental incapacity plan, so assets moved early
This is the pattern we see too often. Children start to worry that they may not get their inheritance, and assets get moved once a parent is diagnosed with dementia. By the time anyone objects, the money is somewhere else and the parent can no longer say what they wanted.
A joint bank account is not shared money
Adding a child's name to an account so they can help with the banking does not decide who owns the balance afterwards. That question gets decided later, on evidence of what you intended.
A jointly held property is not a full inheritance
How a property is held can override what your will says about it. If you hold it as joint tenants, your share can pass to the surviving owner and never reach the person named in your will.
A gift to one child is not assumed
If you meant one child to keep something, that has to be written down. Nobody's memory of a conversation counts for much once there is money on the table.
Why we put this one on the page
Estate planning and mental incapacity planning are not about how much you have. They are about protecting a family at the point when capacity fades and emotions are at their highest. That is the whole job.
Commentary by Julian Oh on a report in The Straits Times. Read the original report.
The Straits Times · Tan Ooi Boon · 16 November 2025
When relatives couldn't inherit $4m in their joint accounts with the family patriarch
After he was diagnosed with cancer, he added his wife's and his eldest daughter's names to his bank accounts. They assumed the $4 million in them was theirs. Singapore's highest court held it belonged to all four of his children.
What happened
The patriarch added the names of his wife and his daughter as joint account owners after his cancer diagnosis. He later amended his will in respect of his house, but he did not change the clause stating that his other assets, including his savings, were to be shared equally among that daughter and his three other children.
What the court decided
The court noted that he was meticulous, taking care even to state bank branch names correctly, and found that he had not intended to give the money to the joint account holders but had added their names for administrative purposes. Because he had not changed his beneficiaries when he rewrote part of his will soon after the banking transactions, the Court of Appeal ruled that each of his four children would share the savings equally: $1 million each. The court also noted that he had carved out only $80,000 from those joint accounts for his wife when he amended his will, and that it would be irrational to make so small a gift out of a pool that was supposedly going to her entirely.
The misconception the court corrected
Many people believe joint account owners have an automatic right of survivorship, because bank documents call the surviving owners beneficial owners. The court clarified that the survivorship clause is merely a contractual arrangement between the bank and the account holders about how the bank may deal with the money. Justice Belinda Ang said: "We found it significant that the provisions did not make any express reference to equitable ownership of the joint accounts but rather were focused on the issue of who the banks were entitled to act on the instructions of, in the event of the death of one of the account holders." Beneficial ownership, in that context, means the right to deal with the money, not who ultimately owns it. That depends on what the owner intended.
What we do about it
If you are adding a family member's name to an account so they can help you, say in your will what that account is for. If you mean them to keep it, say that. Without a will, the joint owner can simply claim you meant to give it to them, and it is hard to refute.
Summarised from reporting in The Straits Times, 16 November 2025. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
The Straits Times · Opinion · Bussarawan Teerawichitchainan · 21 April 2026
As more Singaporeans age with smaller families, end-of-life planning must evolve
The systems and norms continue to assume a central role for family members, even when the reality is often very different.
What the commentary argues
Singapore became a super-aged society in 2026, with at least 21 per cent of the population aged 65 and above. Around 15 per cent of older Singaporeans are childless, and childlessness is higher in the younger cohorts coming behind them. Singapore has been proactive in promoting Advance Care Planning, but the systems and social norms around it still assume that a family member will be available to act as decision maker. For a growing number of people that assumption no longer holds.
What the research found
The writer, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at NUS, finds that childless people, and particularly childless women, often plan more proactively, driven by their own experience of caregiving and a wish not to burden others. Childless men engage far less. The common barriers are misconceptions: that planning of this kind is costly, that it is legalistic, or that it is only for the seriously ill.
What she recommends
Normalise the conversation earlier in life rather than at the point of crisis, improve public understanding, build support for decision makers who are not family members, and target outreach at the groups least engaged. She frames the whole subject as being less about death than about making sure your own voice is still heard.
What this article is, and what it is not
This commentary is about Advance Care Planning, which covers medical and end-of-life care decisions. It is not about wills, and it is not about Lasting Powers of Attorney. We are not going to present it as though it were. It sits here because the assumption it questions, that somebody close to you will be there and willing to speak for you, is the same assumption that leaves an LPA unmade until it is too late to make one.
What we do about it
We ask who you would actually want deciding for you, and whether that person knows it, before we prepare anything. Where there is no obvious family member, that is a conversation to have early rather than a gap to leave open.
Summarised from a commentary published in The Straits Times, 21 April 2026. Read the original. The original article remains the property of its publisher.
