What this is

A continuously maintained picture of your affairs, tested against the events that will eventually happen to you.

Most estate products are a document generator with a client database attached. You answer questions, a will comes out, and the file goes quiet for a decade while your life changes around it. The problem is that a will is a stable document sitting in the middle of an unstable world. Your bank accounts, policy numbers, business interests, guardianship arrangements and funeral wishes all move. The will does not.

So the platform keeps the volatile information around a stable will, and it does the one thing a filing cabinet cannot: it notices when the pieces stop agreeing with each other.

It serves four different situations, which are deliberately not treated as one. Planning while you are well. Continuity if you are alive but cannot make decisions. The immediate aftermath of a death. And the long administration that follows. Each has a different audience, a different urgency and a different rule about what may be disclosed.

What it will not do

These limits are real, and we would rather be blunt about them than have you assume otherwise.

We do not give financial product advice. If the system finds that your life cover would not settle your bond, it will tell you the gap exists and how large it is. It will not tell you which policy to buy, whether to switch, or which product suits you. That is regulated advice and it belongs to a licensed financial adviser. We will refer you to one.

We do not do tax. No estate duty or capital gains computation, no returns, no advice on the tax consequences of a structure. Where a plan has obvious tax implications, we say so and point you to your accountant.

We do not administer estates. After a death, an estate is reported to the Master of the High Court and administered by the executor under the Administration of Estates Act 66 of 1965. Our job is to give your executor and your family what they need, quickly and in one place.

We do not give medical advice. We record your treatment preferences precisely. We do not tell you what to prefer.

We do not value your assets. Values are your own estimates or figures from statements you supply, used for planning and not for any purpose needing a formal valuation.

Getting started

You begin with yourself and the people around you, because everything else in the system refers to a person and a relationship.

Your legal identity comes first: full legal names exactly as they appear on your identity document, any previous names, your identity or passport number, tax number and country of tax residence, and your address and contact details. Previous names matter more than people expect. An asset still registered in a former name creates work for an executor at exactly the wrong moment.

Then your relationship status, which is not a married-or-not question. South African law recognises civil marriage, customary marriage, civil union, and a permanent life partnership with reciprocal duties of support, and the matrimonial property regime changes the outcome entirely. In community of property, out of community with accrual, and out of community without accrual produce three different estates from identical facts. If you are married in community of property you own half of a joint estate, and you can only leave your half.

After that you build outward: your family, what you own, what you owe, your policies, your documents. You do not have to do it in one sitting and you should not try.

It is useful before it is finished

Long onboarding is where products like this die. People start, stall at the third form, and never come back.

So the system is designed to be worth something at twenty per cent complete and to keep earning the next twenty. Enter your family and your policies alone, and the beneficiary register will already tell you something you did not know. Add your liabilities and it will tell you whether your estate has enough cash. Nothing waits for the whole picture.

Every report says plainly what it could not see. A readiness score based on partial information is labelled as such, and it tells you which missing item would improve it most, so the next twenty minutes you spend are the twenty minutes that matter.

You and your family

The family map is a navigable tree: you, your spouse or partner, children, grandchildren, parents, siblings and anyone else who belongs in the picture.

For each person the system holds the ordinary details, and then the attributes that actually drive decisions. Whether they are financially dependent on you, legally dependent, a minor, disabled, adopted, a stepchild, a foster child, or estranged. Then the roles they hold: guardian, intended guardian, beneficiary, contingent beneficiary, executor, trustee, healthcare decision maker, emergency contact.

One person is usually several of those at once, which is why they are held as one record with many roles rather than typed into six different lists that then disagree.

Estrangement is recorded rather than politely omitted. It changes what a plan should do, and a system that cannot express it will produce advice that ignores a live problem.

Dependants, children and guardianship

Dependants are broader than children. A spouse or partner, parents, a disabled relative, a domestic worker, a former spouse receiving maintenance, a student, an informal dependant who has relied on you for years without anything in writing. For each one the system records the monthly requirement, housing, medical and education needs, how long the need is expected to last, what funds it now, and what would fund it after your death. The engine then compares that total against what your estate could actually pay.

For every minor child the system records the current legal guardians, your preferred guardian and two alternates, whether that person has agreed, where the child should live, their school, medical needs, the relationships to preserve, financial support, the trust that would hold their inheritance, the age at which it vests, and anything else that matters.

Ask your intended guardian whether they will do it. A guardian who declines, and an executor who was never asked, are two of the most common failures we find, and both are avoidable with one conversation.

What you own

Property, from a primary residence through rental, holiday, vacant land, farms, commercial buildings, foreign property and timeshares, each with the ownership percentage, joint owners, title deed, bond and bank, value, address, insurance, rates and the beneficiary you intend it for.

Vehicles, including the ones people forget to think of as assets: caravans, boats, aircraft, trailers, collectables.

Financial holdings, covering bank and fixed deposit accounts, money market, shares, unit trusts, exchange traded funds, brokerage and investment portfolios, offshore investments, foreign bank accounts, cryptocurrency and digital wallets.

Personal assets: jewellery, art, firearms, collections, antiques, equipment, precious metals, intellectual property.

Money owed to you is kept separately because it is routinely forgotten and frequently material. Loans to children, director and shareholder loans, personal loans, money a business owes its owner, informal loans, rental deposits, outstanding invoices, legal claims, tax refunds. These are assets of your estate and your executor will not find them unless you write them down.

What you owe

Bonds, vehicle finance, personal loans, credit cards, overdrafts, tax liabilities and SARS disputes, maintenance obligations, student loans, medical debt, lease liabilities, informal and foreign debt, and litigation.

The system asks about guarantees and suretyships in plain words, because the technical term does not jog anyone's memory: have you ever signed surety for a company, a child, a spouse or anyone else?

Suretyships are easily forgotten and can consume an otherwise healthy estate. So can a contingent liability nobody recorded. They are asked about directly for that reason.

Policies, retirement and employment benefits

Life, funeral, disability, severe illness, income protection, credit life, bond protection, key person, buy and sell, endowment, investment, medical, short term and business insurance.

Each policy holds the insurer, policy number, and then four separate people who are frequently not the same person: the policy owner, the life insured, the premium payer and the beneficiary. Conflating them is a common and expensive error. It also holds the beneficiary percentage, the contingent beneficiary, your broker, the claims procedure, the account the premium comes off, the last review date and whether the policy is live, lapsed or paid up.

Retirement and employment benefits are held separately from ordinary assets because they generally fall outside your estate and are distributed under their own rules. Pension, provident, retirement annuity and preservation funds, employer death benefits, group life, disability cover, unused leave, outstanding salary, share schemes, employer loans and foreign retirement products, along with the fund administrator, your nomination forms, and when those nominations were last made.

That last date matters. A fund nomination made in 2011 and never revisited is one of the commonest ways money goes to the wrong person, and no will can fix it.

Trusts

Whether you are the founder, a trustee, a beneficiary, a donor or the holder of a loan account, with the trust name, registration number, deed, letters of authority, trustees, beneficiaries, assets, bank, accountant, tax number, loan accounts, distributions and successor trustees.

The system then tests whether your estate plan and your trust structure actually agree with one another. They frequently do not, and the disagreement usually surfaces years after both were set up by different people.

Your business

For each business: legal form, registration number, your ownership percentage, shareholders, directors, share certificates, the shareholders agreement, memorandum of incorporation, buy and sell agreement, key person cover, bank accounts, accountant, auditor, payroll, staff, major clients and suppliers, licences, contracts, intellectual property, debt, sureties, access arrangements, domains and hosting.

Then the module asks the question that actually decides whether a business survives you: if you die tonight, who operates this company tomorrow morning?

The answer might be that your spouse takes over, a partner buys your shares, the company is sold, the management team continues, a child inherits, a trust receives the shares, the executor sells, or it winds down. Whichever it is, the system checks it against reality. Wanting your daughter to run the business is not a plan if she holds no shares, no directorship and no banking access.

Documents

For every document the system holds a digital copy, and separately the location of the physical original, who holds it, its date, version, expiry and when it was last verified.

Identity documents, passports, birth and marriage certificates, divorce orders, antenuptial contracts, your will and any codicils, trust deeds, title deeds, vehicle papers, policies, investment statements, tax returns, business documents, contracts, share certificates, medical directives, firearm documents and foreign documents.

The module exists to answer the one question an executor actually asks, which is not what does the will say but where is it.

Digital accounts, and why we never hold a password

An inventory of your email, cloud storage, social platforms, websites, domains, hosting, online businesses, subscriptions, cryptocurrency and exchanges, online banking, accounting systems, photo libraries and digital intellectual property. Each account carries an instruction for after your death: delete, memorialise, transfer, archive, download, keep active for a while, or release the contents to a named person.

The access register records the service, the account owner, the username, which password manager you use, the entry name inside it, your multi factor method, your recovery email and phone, where your backup codes are kept, your nominated emergency access person, and the recovery procedure.

If you want a vault for your credentials, that is a separate service on separate infrastructure, encrypted with a key we do not hold. That is the point of it, and it also means that if you lose that key the contents are gone.

Household continuity and liquidity

The test is simple. If you were admitted to intensive care tonight, could your household keep running?

The module records electricity, water, rates, levies, rent or bond, internet, mobile contracts, security, domestic and garden services, school fees, medical scheme, vehicle payments, insurance, subscriptions and debit orders, and identifies which account pays each one. If everything comes off an account only you can access, that is a finding, and it is one of the fastest to fix.

Two calculations sit alongside it, and both say more than a completeness percentage ever could.

Survivor liquidity compares your household's monthly requirement against funds that would actually be available, and reports a runway in months.

Estate liquidity compares your assets, less liabilities, less the expected estate expenses, taxes and professional costs, against the cash genuinely available to pay them. It flags the asset rich and cash poor estate, which is the one that forces a family to sell a house they wanted to keep.

Funeral, possessions and pets

Body disposition, being burial, cremation, donation or another culturally appropriate option, with the detail that goes with each: cemetery, family plot, who you should be buried beside, coffin, clothing, religious requirements, crematorium, and what happens to ashes.

Service detail covering the funeral provider, whether it is prepaid, the policy, religious or civil service, place, officiant, speakers, pallbearers, music, readings, flowers or donations, dress code, open or closed coffin, viewing, wake, catering, obituary, livestream and photography.

Personal detail covering your preferred photograph, biography, obituary notes, who must be told, what should be said on social media, and anything you do not want disclosed.

Personal possessions is a plain who-gets-what register with photographs. A ring to a daughter, a watch to a son, a painting to a sister, a photograph collection to all the children. It is technically the simplest thing in the system and disproportionately valuable, because this is what families actually argue about.

Pets get a real plan: animal, name, microchip, vet, medication, food, insurance, preferred and alternate caregiver, financial provision, where the documents are, and what happens if the caregiver says no.

Personal legacy

Optional, and the part clients value most in the end. Letters to a spouse, to each child, to grandchildren. Family history, life lessons, stories, recipes, an ethical will, video, voice recordings, photographs.

None of it is legally operative. It is the part your family will actually keep.

The will interview

The interview builds your intention. It does not ask you to write legal prose, and you should not try.

It covers your executor first. You name a primary, a first alternate and a second alternate, whether each is a professional or a family member, the fee arrangement, their contact details and relationship to you, and crucially whether they have accepted the appointment and when that was last confirmed. An estate cannot be administered without an executor with authority from the Master, so a single unconfirmed executor is treated as a defect and reported.

Then distribution. The whole estate, percentage shares, specific cash amounts, or specific assets, with a residue clause catching everything not otherwise dealt with.

Every gift carries a chain, not a single name. House to my spouse; if my spouse dies before me, to my children equally; if a child dies before me, to that child's children; if none survive, to a named trust. The absence of a substitute is one of the most common weaknesses in ordinary wills, and the system will not let a gift be recorded without one.

You will also be asked a question most people have never considered. If one of your children dies before you, should that child's share go to their children, or be shared among your surviving children? The first is called per stirpes and the second per capita. Almost everyone assumes the first, the difference is enormous, and the interview presents it using your own children's names rather than as an abstraction.

The beneficiary register

One consolidated view of every nomination across every instrument you hold: your will, each policy, each retirement fund, each trust. Product or asset, beneficiary, percentage, and the date it was last confirmed.

This single screen is where the product usually proves itself in the first session, because nobody has ever seen all of their nominations side by side before. Typical findings: a will leaving everything to a current spouse while a life policy still names the former spouse. Percentages totalling ninety or a hundred and ten. A beneficiary who died two years ago. A nomination with no contingent beneficiary. A nomination last confirmed in 2016.

A nomination on a policy or a fund is a separate instrument from your will, and your will cannot override it. That surprises people, and it is the reason this register exists.

Signing it properly

The signing is the legal act. Get this wrong and everything before it was decoration.

• You sign at the end of the will, and on every page.
• Two competent witnesses must both be present at the same time when you sign or acknowledge your signature.
• They then sign in your presence and in the presence of each other.
• A witness must be 14 or older and competent to give evidence in court.
• You must be 16 or older and mentally capable of appreciating the nature and effect of what you are doing.

No blanks are left anywhere in a signed will, and a correction is never initialled onto a signed document. If something is wrong, it is reprinted and signed again.

Afterwards, the original goes into agreed custody and its location is recorded on your file so your executor can find it. A will that cannot be found is treated much like a will that was never made. A copy is not a substitute.

Two things that change a will without you touching it

Divorce. If you die within three months of your divorce, the law reads your will as though your former spouse had died before you. After those three months it does not, and a will still benefiting a former spouse will be carried out exactly as written. People forget this while they are dealing with everything else, and the three months pass.

Nothing else. Marriage does not revoke a will in South African law, and neither does the birth of a child. Your old will stays in force until you replace it, which is why an event should send you back to us rather than being assumed to have fixed itself.

When we involve an attorney

We draft wills ourselves, under the supervision of an admitted attorney who owns the precedents we use. Some matters should not be settled without an attorney directly involved, and where one arises we tell you, explain why, and refer it rather than working around it.

The circumstances that trigger a referral: foreign assets or a foreign will, an estate already contested or likely to be, creating or restructuring a trust, business succession depending on shareholders or buy and sell agreements with third parties, a beneficiary whose disability, vulnerability or insolvency makes a direct inheritance unwise, a customary marriage involving more than one spouse, and any doubt about capacity or undue influence.

An attorney's fee for that work is separate from ours and is agreed with you before the work begins.

The three engines

They read the same picture and answer three different questions.

Contradiction: does my plan agree with itself?

It compares your stated intention against your recorded facts, continuously, not once. A will leaving everything to your current spouse while a policy still names the previous one. A wish for your daughter to run the business, in a company where she holds nothing. A bond you want settled, with cover that will not settle it. Children to stay at their school, and survivor liquidity that will not fund a year of fees.

Scenario: what happens if?

You test the plan instead of learning succession law. I die tonight. My spouse dies first. We die together in the same accident. My beneficiary dies before me. My executor dies, refuses, or cannot be found. My will cannot be found or is challenged. My estate has no cash, or is insolvent. I am unconscious for forty-eight hours, or six months. I develop dementia. I marry, divorce, remarry, have another child, adopt. I emigrate.

Each one runs against your real record and reports where the plan breaks, and why.

Readiness: how ready am I, and for what?

Separate scores for legal, financial, family continuity, medical and incapacity, death and funeral, digital estate, business continuity and document readiness. Each score lists the specific unresolved items behind it, so it is a task list rather than a grade.

There is deliberately no single blended percentage. A number that averages a strong will with an absent guardian tells you nothing you can act on, and it lets you feel finished when you are not.

Two buttons put this in your hands rather than your planner's. If I die tonight runs the death path. If I wake up unable to speak runs the incapacity path, and it usually exposes an entirely different and more urgent set of failures.

Reading a finding

Every finding tells you what was compared, what disagreed, why it matters, and what would resolve it. It also carries the date it was evaluated and the version of the rule that produced it.

That last part is not bureaucracy. The legal rules the system reasons with are held as versioned data, settled by lawyers on a date. When a rule changes, findings are evaluated again, and any that no longer hold are withdrawn with a reason. If you were told last year that a nomination contradicted your will, you are entitled to know when that stops being true, and why.

A finding is not advice. It is a statement about your own records. What you do about it is a decision for you, with your planner, and where it needs a licensed adviser or an attorney we will say so.

The four states

No single event unlocks your whole record. The ladder releases progressively, each step is logged and attributed, and everyone affected is notified when it happens.

If you cannot speak for yourself

Incapacity is planned for separately from death, because it is a different event releasing different information to different people under different authority.

You name a healthcare representative and at least one alternate, and you give them written authority. That written mandate matters: under the National Health Act 61 of 2003 there is a defined order of people who may consent to treatment for someone who cannot consent personally, and it begins with a person mandated in writing. Naming someone in a document nobody signed puts them lower down that order, behind people who may know nothing of your wishes.

Your representative signs their own acceptance. An unaware representative is the commonest failure in advance care planning, and the system reports an unsigned acceptance as a defect in exactly the way it reports an unconfirmed executor.

Your treatment preferences are recorded at proper resolution rather than as a single resuscitation tick. Each treatment is considered against each circumstance, and for each you can answer yes, no, try it and review after a stated period, or leave it to my representative. That third option is the one usually missing from consumer forms and often the one people actually mean.

Above all, the system lets you record the distinction that matters most to people: treatment where recovery is reasonably possible, as against not prolonging life artificially where there is no reasonable prospect of recovery.

Whatever else you choose, comfort is not traded away. Pain and distress are treated.

The incapacity pack itself covers doctors, medical scheme, medication, healthcare wishes, your representative's details, children, pets, household payments, employer, business continuity, key advisers, document locations and financial emergency information.

Your emergency card

A paramedic at a roadside at two in the morning does not have an attorney, and cannot wait for one. So the emergency card sits outside the whole access system deliberately.

It is yours to carry: a printed wallet card, a QR code, and an entry on your phone. It needs no login, no permission and no state change. It holds only what an emergency responder needs, being your name and identity number, blood type, allergies, critical conditions, current medication, medical scheme, doctor, emergency contacts, your healthcare representative, and where your advance care documents are held.

It holds nothing about your money, your beneficiaries or your accounts, so that losing it costs you nothing but a reprint.

For families: the first 72 hours

If someone has just died, this is the only section you need

Your family pack is written for people who are not in a state to read anything long. It is printed and kept with the will, and it covers the immediate only.

Today

• Contact emergency services and the doctor if that has not happened.
• Contact close family.
• Contact the funeral provider named in the pack. If a policy is prepaid, the pack says so and gives the number.
• Find the identity document and the funeral instructions. The pack says where they are.
• Secure the home. Take care of children and pets. Secure anything valuable.

Over the next few days

• Contact the planner or attorney named in the pack.
• Locate the original will. The pack records exactly where it is and who holds it.
• Notify the employer.
• Identify the policies. The pack lists them with claim procedures.
• Begin reporting the estate to the Master of the High Court.
• Protect any business operations that cannot pause.
• Secure the digital accounts using the recorded recovery procedures.

You are not expected to know estate law. You are expected to make phone calls, and the pack gives you the numbers in the order you will need them.

For executors

You have been named to administer someone's estate

Your pack is a different document from the family pack, and it is comprehensive rather than immediate.

It carries the deceased's details, their family, the location of the will, your own appointment details, the beneficiaries, the assets, the liabilities, banks, investments, property, businesses, policies, retirement funds, trusts, tax position, advisers, digital accounts, document locations, a claims checklist, the people to contact, and the immediate financial commitments that will not wait for the estate to be wound up.

Three things to know before you begin.

You need authority first. An estate is administered under the Master's supervision, and you cannot administer or distribute anything before the Master has issued your letters of executorship or letters of authority. The pack is what lets you prepare while you wait.

The pack carries recovery procedures, never credentials. Where a digital account has to be dealt with, you are given the provider's own recovery process and the nominated contact, because that is the lawful route. There are no passwords in it and there never were any in the system.

Nominations are not controlled by the will. Policies and retirement funds pay out according to their own nominations and their own rules. The beneficiary register shows you both pictures side by side, which is usually the fastest way to understand what you are actually administering.

If you were named without being asked, say so. It happens more often than it should, and it is far better said now than after you have accepted.

Who can see what

Access is a function of role and of state together. Being someone's spouse does not by itself grant access to anything, and no single event opens the whole record.

You can see, at any time, a log of who has looked at your information and when. That log is not editable by anyone, including us.

How a state is changed

This is the most sensitive mechanism in the system, so it is the strictest.

Only a verified professional can move your record between alive, incapacitated and deceased. That means an attorney, a planner or a treating clinician whose professional registration has been checked, and who is identified individually rather than as an account with a role.

They must attest against real evidence, which is held on the record: a clinical note or a court order for incapacity, a death certificate for death, and the Master's letters of executorship before estate information is released to an executor.

No family member can move your state. No amount of insistence, grief or urgency changes that, and it is deliberate. The alternative is a system where a determined person can unlock a living client's entire financial life by asserting something untrue at the right moment.

Every attestation is signed, timestamped and permanent. You are notified where you can still be notified, and so is everyone nominated.

The one thing that does not wait for any of this is your emergency card, which is why it exists.

Your information

This platform asks for more personal information than almost anything else you will ever complete, so you are owed a straight account of what happens to it.

Where you come to us through a planning practice, that practice is the responsible party for your information under the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013, and we operate the platform for them as their operator. That is a defined relationship with a written contract behind it, not a marketing description.

Under that contract we may process your information only on the practice's instruction, must keep it confidential, must maintain specified security measures, and must notify them immediately of any unauthorised access.

We may not use your information for our own purposes at all. Not for statistics, not for market research, not for benchmarking, not to build products, and not to train any artificial intelligence system, whether or not it has been de-identified. That is a term of the contract, not a policy we could quietly revise.

Your information is stored and processed in South Africa and is not sent out of the country.

You may ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, ask for a copy in a portable form, withdraw a consent, or object on reasonable grounds. Some things must be kept, particularly executed documents and the evidence of how they were signed, and where that applies you will be told plainly which item and why rather than having it quietly retained.

Special categories, being your health information and the religious or philosophical beliefs behind your funeral wishes, are held only with your explicit consent, which you can withdraw.

Almost everything you record involves someone else, so we rely on you having told the people whose details you give us. Where a person is a child, we rely on a competent person having consented on their behalf.

Security

The platform will hold enough about you to do you real harm, so security is a functional requirement with acceptance criteria, not a hardening pass at the end.

• Multi factor authentication is mandatory for every account with professional access, and cannot be switched off.
• Your information is encrypted in storage and in transit, with additional encryption over the most sensitive parts and key material held away from the database.
• Tenancies are isolated at the database layer, so a fault in the application cannot expose one practice's clients to another.
• Every field carries a sensitivity classification, which governs who sees it, what is redacted on export, and what appears in each pack.
• Every access and change is written to an audit trail that cannot be edited.
• Backups are encrypted, held in more than one place, and restoring from them is tested on a schedule rather than assumed.
• The platform is independently security reviewed before it holds any client information, and at regular intervals afterwards.
• No credential belonging to you is stored anywhere in it.

No system is beyond risk and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. If your information is ever accessed by someone who should not have it, you will be told.

Keeping it true

A plan is only as good as the day it was last checked, so reviews are part of the service rather than an upsell.

The annual review asks what has changed across marriage, divorce, a new partner, births, adoptions, deaths, new dependants, property bought or sold, a new business, policies, banks, investments, an inheritance, retirement, beneficiary and executor changes, guardianship, funeral and medical wishes, account recovery and country of residence, and then compares it against last year's version so you can see what moved.

Event triggered reviews fire independently of the annual cycle. Marriage, divorce, a birth, an adoption, a death, a serious diagnosis, retirement, emigration, buying a business or a property, a major inheritance, and the death or incapacity of anyone you named as executor, trustee, guardian or beneficiary.

At every review your executor pack, family pack and emergency card are regenerated, and you are asked to confirm that the people holding copies have the current version. A family holding a superseded copy is the second most common failure after nobody holding one at all.

For advisers and practices

Life's Next Chapter is the client-facing side of LifeFile, the platform a practice actually works in. The professional portal is part of the first release rather than an addition later, because a planning practice is not a consumer product with more logins.

A practice creates and manages its own advisers, each individually identified, and each client record belongs to the practice. Advisers see a client list, a review workflow, and case notes that preserve a distinction ordinary notes lose: what the client told us, what we advised, and what the client decided, with the date, the meeting, the confirmation, the prior instruction and the reason for any change. When a family disputes something five years later, that record is what settles it.

Because the practice is the responsible party for its clients' information, consent capture, data subject requests, corrections, deletions and export are all actions the practice performs directly in the application rather than requests it sends to us. A practice can also export and take its entire client set with it at any time, which is a feature rather than a concession.

Practices interested in the platform should use the contact below. Onboarding involves two agreements signed together: a services agreement, and a written operator agreement under section 21 of the Act.

Glossary

Accrual

A system in an antenuptial contract under which the growth in each spouse's estate during the marriage is shared on divorce or death. It can be included or expressly excluded, and which one applies changes the outcome entirely.

Codicil

A document amending an existing will. It must be signed and witnessed with the same formalities as a will.

Contingent beneficiary

The person who takes a benefit if the first named beneficiary cannot. Their absence is one of the most common weaknesses in ordinary arrangements.

Executor

The person who administers your estate after your death, under the supervision of the Master of the High Court, and only once the Master has given them authority.

Intestate

Dying without a valid will. Your estate is then distributed under the Intestate Succession Act 81 of 1987, in fixed shares that take no account of what you wanted.

Letters of executorship

The document from the Master that gives an executor authority to act. Nothing may be administered or distributed before it is issued.

Master of the High Court

The office supervising the administration of deceased estates.

Nomination

A beneficiary designation on a policy, retirement fund or trust. It is a separate instrument from your will, and your will does not override it.

Per stirpes and per capita

If a beneficiary dies before you, per stirpes passes their share to their own descendants, and per capita shares it among the surviving beneficiaries instead.

Residue

Everything in your estate not specifically given away, dealt with by the residue clause of your will.

Suretyship

A promise to pay someone else's debt if they do not. Easily forgotten, and capable of consuming an otherwise healthy estate.

Testamentary capacity

Being 16 or older and mentally capable of appreciating the nature and effect of making a will, at the time you make it.

Usufruct

A right to use an asset and take its income for a period, usually for life, while ownership sits with someone else.

Contact

The Archive and Heritage Digital Commons Group.

This platform is in development and is not yet open for client sign-up. Practices and advisers who want to be part of the first release, and anyone with a question about what is described here, should get in touch.

If you believe your information has been handled improperly, contact us first. You may also complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa.