Inheritance

Writing Your Will

2026-07-25

Writing Your Will

Most people I know put off writing their will for years. They think it's either morbid, complicated, or something only the very rich need to worry about. I used to hear this all the time from clients who'd come to me, often after a family crisis, wishing they'd planned earlier.

The truth is, a well-written will is one of the kindest things you can do for your family. It saves them from years of legal wrangling, family arguments, and emotional heartburn at an already difficult time. Let me walk you through how to do this properly, the way I walk my own clients through it.

Step 1: List Every Asset You Own

Before you can divide anything, you need to know what you actually have. Sounds obvious, right? But you'd be surprised how often people forget assets — a savings account they opened decades ago, a small plot of land their father gifted them, or a life insurance policy bought in the 1990s.

Start by making a comprehensive inventory. Don't rely on memory. Pull out your papers, open your locker, and list everything:

I had a client, Mr. Sharma, a retired government officer from Pune. He thought he had four assets. When we sat down and went through everything, we found eleven — including a joint plot in Nagpur that his late father had registered in both their names, which had never been transferred. That discovery alone saved his children from a future legal nightmare.

💡 Keep a "Master Asset Document" and update it every year, ideally around your birthday. Your family should know where to find it.

Step 2: One Asset, One Heir — Keep It Simple

Here is the single most powerful piece of advice I give every client: wherever possible, assign one specific asset to one specific person. Avoid joint inheritance of a single asset unless it's truly unavoidable.

Joint inheritance sounds fair on paper — "both my sons get equal share of the flat" — but in practice, it creates endless complications. Who pays the maintenance? Who decides when to sell? What if one wants to live there and the other wants to rent it out?

A far cleaner approach is to equalise in value, not in joint ownership. For example:

Both get roughly equal value, but each gets clear, independent ownership over their assets. No need to coordinate. No need to agree before selling. No arguments.

I worked with a family in Bengaluru where three siblings co-inherited a house. One lived abroad, one lived in the house rent-free, and the third was desperately trying to liquidate his share for funds. That house sat in dispute for nine years. Nine years. All of it was avoidable.

💡 Make a spreadsheet. List each legal heir in one column, the assets assigned to them in another, and the approximate value in a third. Make sure the total is roughly equal — that's your equity check.

Step 3: Think Practically — Not Everyone Can Handle Every Asset

This is the part most people don't think about, and it's where a lot of wills create more problems than they solve. Just because someone is your legal heir doesn't mean every type of asset is suitable for them.

Real estate, in particular, is one of the hardest assets to inherit — especially for someone who lives in a different city or country, is elderly, or isn't financially savvy. Inheriting a property means dealing with mutation (property name transfer), paying property tax, dealing with tenants if it's rented, handling society maintenance — and if you ever want to sell, you need a clear chain of title documents, sometimes going back 30 years.

Ask yourself these questions for each heir:

I had a client who left her Coimbatore flat to her son who lives in the US on an H-1B visa. He couldn't travel easily, couldn't manage tenants remotely, and couldn't sell without being present. The flat sat locked for three years, deteriorating, while her daughter — who lived ten minutes away — was left liquid assets she didn't really need. A simple swap would have been so much smarter.

💡 Liquid assets like mutual funds, FDs, and insurance go to those who are far away or less property-savvy. Immovable property goes to those who are local, capable, and interested in managing it.

Step 4: Clean Up Ancestral and Jointly Held Properties

This is the elephant in the room for most Indian families. There's almost always a property somewhere — a village house, an old plot, an agricultural field — that is technically owned by someone who has been dead for twenty years. Or a flat that was purchased jointly by you and your brother and never formally divided.

These are time bombs. Every generation that passes makes the title more tangled, the documents harder to find, and the family disputes harder to resolve. Courts are full of cases where grandchildren of original owners are battling each other over properties worth a fraction of what they've spent in legal fees.

Before you finalise your will, try to clean this up:

I cannot stress this enough. One of my saddest cases was a family in Delhi — four siblings, ages 65 to 72 — fighting over an ancestral property in UP that their grandfather had left undivided. By the time the youngest sibling passed, none of the four had enjoyed the property, and the legal costs had consumed nearly a third of its market value. Their children — first cousins who had once been close — were no longer on speaking terms.

💡 Think of cleaning up ancestral properties as a gift to your children and grandchildren. It may take time, money, and some difficult family conversations — but it's worth every bit of it.

Step 5: Explain Your Reasoning in the Will Itself

Most wills are written in dry, legalistic language that just states who gets what. That's legally fine — but humanly, it often leaves people confused or hurt. Why did Dad leave more to one child than the other? Why did Mum leave the jewellery to the daughter-in-law instead of the daughter?

In India, where family dynamics and perceived fairness carry enormous emotional weight, unexplained decisions in a will can cause decades of ill will (pun intended). The good news is, you can include a short explanatory note — either within the will or attached to it — that explains your thinking.

For example:

"I am leaving the Andheri flat to my son Rahul because he has lived there for the past twelve years and has contributed significantly to its upkeep. To compensate, I am leaving my entire mutual fund portfolio to my daughter Priya, which is of equivalent value. It is my sincere wish that both children understand this as an attempt at equitable distribution and not as a reflection of preference."

This kind of language disarms resentment before it can take root. It shows thought, intention, and fairness — even if the assets aren't perfectly equal. It also leaves less room for a disgruntled heir to successfully challenge the will by claiming the testator was influenced or not of sound mind.

I had a client, a retired professor, who left unequal shares to his three children — more to the one who had cared for him during his illness, less to the one who had rarely visited. He explained this explicitly in his will. When he passed, there was sadness but no litigation. His words, in his own voice, did the work of a thousand arguments.

💡 Write your explanations in simple, personal language. You don't need legal jargon. A heartfelt paragraph explaining your choices is worth more than any lawyer's clause.

Step 6: Have the Conversation — and Get Them to Sign as Witnesses

I know, I know. Talking to your family about your will feels awkward. It feels like you're tempting fate, or like you're announcing your own mortality. But in my experience, the families that have these conversations openly are the ones that sail through the inheritance process with their relationships intact.

You don't have to share every detail — just the broad strokes. "I've made a will. Here's roughly how I've thought about things. I want everyone to understand my reasoning while I'm still around to explain it." That's it. That's the conversation.

In fact, ideally, your legal heirs should not be your witnesses — Indian law (The Indian Succession Act) actually recommends this, since a witness who is also a beneficiary can have the validity of the will questioned. Choose two independent witnesses, ideally people who are younger than you, in good health, and easy to locate later.

But separately from the witness requirement, do consider:

I've seen families where the will was a complete surprise and perfectly logical decisions became the seeds of thirty-year feuds. And I've seen other families where parents sat down with their children, explained the will, and said "if you have objections, let's discuss them now, not in a courtroom later." The difference in outcomes is night and day.

💡 If you're concerned about awkwardness, frame it as practical planning, not a morbid conversation. "I want to make sure you all know what to do and where things are" is much easier to say than "here's what happens when I die."

Step 7: Register the Will — Please

And finally — the step that most people skip, thinking it's unnecessary. Register your will.

In India, registration of a will is not mandatory under the Indian Registration Act, 1908. An unregistered will is legally valid. But — and this is a significant but — a registered will is far more difficult to challenge.

Here's how registration works: You (the testator) and two witnesses take the will to the Sub-Registrar's office in your jurisdiction, along with your ID proof. The Sub-Registrar records your identity, confirms you are of sound mind, and registers the document. The original is returned to you; a copy is kept on government record. The cost is nominal — typically a few hundred rupees.

The benefits are enormous:

I've seen unregistered wills being successfully challenged in court — not because they were fraudulent, but because there was no way to definitively prove when they were written or whether the testator was of sound mind. Registration removes all of that ambiguity.

One client of mine — a businessman in Hyderabad — was meticulous about everything in his will except registration. When he passed, a distant relative contested the will, claiming it was written under duress in his final days. Because there was no registered copy, the case dragged on for four years before his children finally prevailed. Four years of their lives consumed by something a single afternoon at the Sub-Registrar's office could have prevented.

💡 If you ever update or rewrite your will, make sure you either destroy the old copies or explicitly state in the new will that it supersedes all previous versions. And yes — register the new one too.

A Final Word

Writing a will is not a conversation about death. It's a conversation about how much you love the people you're leaving behind — enough to think carefully about their futures, to have difficult conversations, and to do the paperwork that protects them.

The seven steps we've covered — listing your assets, making clean one-to-one assignments, thinking about who can actually manage what, cleaning up old property tangles, explaining your logic, being transparent with your family, and registering the document — none of them are technically difficult. They just require time, thought, and a willingness to act.

Start this weekend. Make the asset list. Everything else will follow from there.

Your family will thank you for it — even if they never say so out loud.

This article is for general guidance only and does not constitute legal advice. Please consult a qualified advocate or estate planner for your specific circumstances.