Are you ready to die peacefully

The second wave brought the pandemic & death closer home. Will-making can’t be put off anymore. And that involves things no one thought of before — guardianship, passwords, cloud storage, will banks and overnight drafts.

If the first wave was a nudge, the second wave has been a shove that knocked life off balance. It impelled those who never thought of drafting wills to consider succession planning for the first time, and those who did think of it but had been putting it off to speed things up.

“If 10% of the educated people were getting wills done earlier, it has jumped to 35-40% now,” said Dr Ajay Kummar Pandey, advocate Supreme Court of India & author of book, "How to write your Will".

This includes people who were not too keen earlier. Instead of us chasing them to get wills done, it’s the other way round now.” another Delhi-based financial planner Ankit Chopra, observed the same: “From what I saw, the first wave witnessed a 10-20% increase in the number of people seeking wills. Now, it is around 40-50%.” HDFC Securities head (products & business development) Rajeev Srivastava said the firm saw an even bigger growth — of 76% — for e-will registrations this fiscal than the last. 

Not having a Will not only complicates the succession planning but will also lead to time consuming costly litigation. 

In absence of Will, a succession certificate can cost anything from one lakh to several lakhs and time of minimum one month.

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