The 5 Things Financial Services Clients Wish Their Adviser Had Told Them About Wills

Most clients don't know what they don't know about wills and estate planning. That's not a criticism — it's simply not something people think about until they're forced to. Which means the adviser who raises these points first, clearly and without jargon, becomes the trusted source. Here are five that consistently land.

1. What actually happens if you die without a will

Most people assume that if they die without a will, "everything just goes to my husband/wife/partner." It doesn't — not automatically, and not always in full.

Under the intestacy rules, if you're married or in a civil partnership with children, your spouse receives a fixed statutory legacy plus a share of the remaining estate — the rest is split with the children, sometimes tying up money a surviving spouse actually needs. Unmarried partners, however long the relationship, inherit nothing under intestacy, no matter how the couple viewed themselves. Stepchildren are typically excluded entirely unless legally adopted.

Raising this single fact — plainly, without scaremongering — is often the moment a client realises their assumptions about "it'll just sort itself out" were wrong. It's rarely met with indifference.

2. Why a DIY or unwitnessed will can be worse than no will at all

Online will templates and kitchen-table DIY wills have a genuine, well-documented failure rate. A will that isn't correctly witnessed — both witnesses present at the same time, neither a beneficiary or married to one — is not just flawed, it's invalid, and the estate falls back to intestacy as if no will existed.

Beyond witnessing, DIY wills commonly fail through ambiguous wording, failing to account for what happens if a beneficiary dies first, or simply not addressing complex assets like business shares or overseas property. The tragedy is that these clients believed they were covered.

This point matters because it reframes the conversation: it's not "do you have a will," it's "do you have a valid, properly executed will" — a much harder question for most people to answer confidently, and a natural opening to offer a proper review.

3. LPAs are not the same thing as a will — and most people confuse them

Ask a client if they have their affairs "sorted," and most are thinking entirely about what happens after death. Almost none are thinking about what happens if they lose mental capacity while still alive — through a stroke, dementia, or an accident.

Without a Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA), a spouse or adult child cannot automatically manage that person's bank accounts, pay their bills, or make care decisions on their behalf — even for a joint account holder, in some circumstances. The family instead has to apply to the Court of Protection for deputyship: a process that typically takes months and costs considerably more than arranging an LPA in advance.

Explaining the distinction — a will handles death, an LPA handles incapacity while alive, and you need both — is often genuinely new information, even for financially sophisticated clients. It's also a natural fit for retirement and later-life planning conversations.

4. Blended families create complications that standard wills don't solve

Second marriages, stepchildren, and blended families are increasingly the norm, not the exception — and standard "mirror wills" (where each spouse leaves everything to the other, then the children) can badly misfire in this situation.

The classic trap: a husband leaves everything to his second wife, assuming she'll "do right" by his children from his first marriage when she eventually passes. There's no legal obligation for her to do so — she could leave everything to her own children instead, and his children could receive nothing. This isn't a hypothetical; it's one of the most common sources of contested estates.

Structures like life interest trusts exist specifically to solve this — allowing a surviving spouse to benefit from the estate during their lifetime while protecting capital for children from a first marriage. Raising this with any client in a blended family is both genuinely useful advice and a clear signal that you understand their situation beyond the numbers.

5. Digital assets and online accounts are routinely forgotten

Modern estates increasingly include things a traditional will process was never designed for: cryptocurrency, online banking-only accounts, digital subscriptions, cloud-stored photos, and social media accounts. Without a clear record and appropriate instructions, these assets can be effectively lost — executors don't know they exist, can't access them, or don't know what the deceased would have wanted done with them.

Encouraging clients to maintain a secure record of digital assets, and to make sure their will and LPA account for who should manage them, is a small, practical piece of advice that most solicitors of the previous generation simply never had to think about — and clients notice when their adviser does.

Why this builds trust — and business

None of these five points require you to draft legal documents or give regulated legal advice. They require you to know enough to ask the right question at the right moment — which is precisely the skill that makes clients trust an adviser with the rest of their financial life.

Each one is also a direct, natural opening to introduce a proper estate planning solution rather than leaving the client to figure it out alone. Spark Solutions gives financial services professionals a branded platform to take that next step immediately, turning the conversation into a completed will, trust or LPA without any extra legal workload on your side.

Book a free demo to see exactly how that conversation turns into a client outcome.