Writing my will turned out to be a love letter

I put off writing my will for years. Same reasons most people do. I'm not old. I'm not rich. The thought of sitting down with a lawyer to talk about what happens after I die felt heavy in a way I didn't want to deal with.

What changed was a conversation with a friend whose father had passed away suddenly. The grief was hard enough. What made it harder was the months of paperwork, the family disagreements, the small confusions about what dad would have wanted. He told me, "I love my dad, but I wish he'd written this down."

That sentence sat with me for weeks.

So I sat down and did it. And what I learned surprised me.

Estate planning isn't only for the wealthy. If you have a bank account, an insurance policy, a CPF balance, an HDB flat, or any meaningful asset, you have an estate. The question isn't whether you have one. It's whether your wishes about it are clear.

A few things I learned along the way:

A will doesn't cover everything. Your CPF is distributed separately, through a CPF nomination. If you haven't made one, the law decides for you. Same with insurance policies that have a named nominee versus those that don't.

A will is more about clarity than control. It doesn't have to be complicated. Mine isn't. It names who looks after my kids if something happens to both my wife and me. It says who handles my estate. It distributes what I have.

The conversation matters as much as the document. I sat down with my wife after I drafted mine. We talked through who, what, and why. That conversation, more than the will itself, gave both of us a kind of peace.

I think we avoid estate planning because we associate it with endings. But sitting with it, I realised it's actually about the people you love. It's a way of saying, "If I'm not here, here's how I want to keep looking after you."

It took me one afternoon and a small fee. The peace of mind has lasted years.

If you've been putting this off, you're not alone. Most of us have. But it's one of the few things in personal finance that genuinely costs little to start, and matters enormously to the people you'd leave behind.