Choosing Backup Beneficiaries With No Children to Inherit

The situation

Beth, a real estate agent, and Soo-jin, an electrician, had been together for fourteen years and owned a home in Caledon jointly. They had never married and had no children, and for most of that time they had never gotten around to writing wills. Like a lot of couples, they had assumed there was no urgency — nothing was wrong, they were both healthy, and the paperwork always seemed to slide down the list behind work and renovations. That changed when Soo-jin's parent died suddenly without a will of their own.

What followed was months of friction between Soo-jin and their sibling, Hyun-woo, over how their parent's estate should be divided. Ontario's rules for someone who dies without a will do not always match what a family assumes will happen, and the two siblings spent the better part of a year working through paperwork, delays, and disagreements over who should administer the estate and how the modest savings and household items should be split, none of which a will would have left open to argument. Watching that process convinced Beth and Soo-jin they needed to sort out their own plan before something similar happened to them. Together, their combined estate — the house, retirement savings, and a small investment account — was worth roughly $900,000, and neither of them had ever formally set out what should happen to any of it.

What the review found

The first thing our team explained was something that surprises a lot of long-term common-law couples: in Ontario, being common-law partners does not give either of them an automatic right to inherit from the other if there is no will. The rules that distribute an estate when someone dies without one, set out in the Succession Law Reform Act, use the word "spouse" in a way that applies to married spouses, not common-law partners. If Beth died without a will, her estate would not pass to Soo-jin by default — it would go to her closest legal relatives, following an order that starts with parents, and moves on to siblings if there are no parents living. The reverse was true for Soo-jin.

Because the couple owned their house as joint tenants — a form of ownership where a surviving owner automatically takes full title when the other owner dies — the home itself was not at immediate risk. But everything else Beth or Soo-jin owned individually, including retirement accounts without a named beneficiary and the investment account, would have followed intestacy rules and bypassed the other partner entirely. Neither of them had realized that fourteen years together carried no automatic weight in the eyes of the law.

The second issue was what happens if they died at close to the same time — in a car accident, for instance. With each other named as primary beneficiary and no backup named, a simultaneous or near-simultaneous death would send each partner's share to their own family under intestacy rules by default, with no coordination between the two estates and no say from either of them about how it should be split.

What we did

1. Drafted mirror wills naming each other as primary beneficiary and estate trustee. Mirror wills are separate wills for each partner that reflect the same basic plan. Each named the other as sole primary beneficiary and as estate trustee — the person responsible for administering the estate, called an executor in everyday language — with a backup estate trustee named in case both were unavailable at the same time.
2. Built in a survivorship clause. Each will included a clause requiring a beneficiary to survive the other by a set number of days to inherit. Without this, a near-simultaneous death can send assets briefly into one estate and then straight back out through the other, adding legal costs and delay for no benefit to anyone.
3. Opened the backup-beneficiary conversation early. This is where the couple did not agree. Soo-jin wanted their full backup share to go to their sibling, Hyun-woo, reasoning that family should stay with family. Beth felt differently — with no children of her own and no family she was close to, she wanted a meaningful portion to go to a cause she cared about rather than assuming it should default to Soo-jin's side of the family alone.
4. Worked through the disagreement as a planning problem, not a relationship one. We laid out the practical options: split the backup share by percentage, name different backups for different assets, or name a mix of individuals and a registered charity. Framing it as a set of concrete choices, rather than an argument about loyalty, let the couple negotiate specifics instead of principles.
5. Added powers of attorney for property and personal care. Alongside the wills, each partner signed documents naming the other to make financial and medical decisions if they became incapable of making those decisions themselves — protection that, again, common-law status does not provide automatically under Ontario law.
6. Reviewed beneficiary designations on registered accounts. Retirement accounts and similar registered savings pass outside a will if a named beneficiary is on file, so we confirmed each partner had named the other directly on those accounts, rather than leaving them to default to the estate.

The outcome

The couple did not land on either partner's original position. Soo-jin agreed to bring their sibling's backup share down from the whole of their portion to roughly 60 percent, with the remaining 40 percent going to a charity Beth had volunteered with for years. Beth, in turn, agreed to name Hyun-woo directly rather than a more distant relative she had initially proposed, once she understood that Hyun-woo had been the one holding their parent's estate together during the difficult year before.

Neither partner got exactly what they first wanted. Soo-jin would have preferred the backup share stay entirely within the family, and had to accept that a meaningful slice — worth roughly $150,000 to $200,000 depending on the eventual size of the estate — would go outside it. Beth had originally hoped for an even three-way split with a separate personal bequest, and gave that up to keep the plan simple enough that both of them were comfortable signing it. What they ended up with was a compromise neither one would have written alone, but one they both felt was fair.

The wills were signed along with the powers of attorney, and the couple left with a plan that did not depend on intestacy rules ever coming into play. If Beth or Soo-jin dies, the other inherits directly, exactly as they intended from the start. If they die within days of each other, the backup split they negotiated — not a default rule neither of them chose — determines where roughly $900,000 in combined assets goes.

What you can learn from this