Your Executor Will Spend $47,000 More Because You Skipped the Will

The median probate fee in Manitoba for a $900,000 estate is roughly $6,500. Add a lawyer to sort out who gets what when there's no will, and you're looking at another $15,000 to $25,000 in legal fees. Throw in delays that freeze accounts for eight months instead of two, and the executor loses another $15,000 to $20,000 in forgone investment returns during 2023's interest rate environment. That's the $47,000. It doesn't count the family arguments.

Intestacy rules in Canada are not designed to reflect what you would have wanted. They are designed to produce an answer when you didn't leave one. If you die without a will in Manitoba, your spouse gets the first $50,000 and splits the rest with your children. If you have no spouse and no children, your parents inherit. If your parents are deceased, your siblings split it. None of this accounts for who actually needs the money, who you're estranged from, or which child already got $80,000 for a down payment in 2019.

What You Think You've Handled

Most professionals assume their RRSP and TFSA beneficiary designations do the heavy lifting. They do, but only for those specific accounts. The house, the non-registered investment account, the car, the cottage, none of that moves by beneficiary designation. It moves by will, or if there's no will, by the intestacy rules in your province's Intestate Succession Act. Beneficiary designations are a patch, not a plan.

The same people who spent six hours comparing mortgage rates will let a $1.2 million estate default to a provincial formula because sitting down with a lawyer for 90 minutes felt like something they'd get to next year. Next year has a way of turning into never.

The Actual Cost Structure

Probate fees in Manitoba run at 0.7% of the estate value, paid to the Court of King's Bench before the executor can access anything. Ontario is worse, 1.5% on amounts over $50,000. BC caps it lower but still charges. Quebec has no probate tax but requires notarial validation, which has its own cost. These are not optional. These are the price of proving to a financial institution that your executor has legal authority to move your money.

Without a will, probate still happens. It just costs more because the court has to appoint an administrator, verify next of kin, and handle disputes that a will would have settled in advance. A straightforward estate that should take two months can stretch to eight or more. During that time, your accounts sit frozen. Rent doesn't get collected. Dividends accumulate but can't be reinvested. The executor, who is probably your spouse or your oldest child, is calling the bank every week and getting transferred.

The Six Documents That Matter

A will is the minimum. A power of attorney for property and a power of attorney for personal care are the other two pieces that keep someone from needing a court order to pay your bills if you're incapacitated. Add updated beneficiary designations on registered accounts, a list of account numbers and passwords your executor can actually find, and a letter of direction that explains what you want done with things the will doesn't cover, the dog, the vinyl collection, who gets your grandmother's ring.

None of this is complicated. A basic will for a married couple with two kids and a house runs about $800 to $1,500 with a lawyer in Winnipeg. The powers of attorney add another $400. You can do it in two meetings.

What kills estates is not the complexity of the planning. It's the assumption that you'll get to it when things settle down, and then things never settle down, and then someone else is sitting in a lawyer's office six months after your funeral trying to reverse-engineer your intentions from a joint bank account and a verbal promise you made in 2018.

Your executor will either spend two months and $8,000 executing a plan you left them, or they will spend eight months and $47,000 trying to guess.