No Will, Two Kids: An Intestate Estate in Mississauga

The situation

Raymond was 34 and worked as a factory technician on a shift line in Mississauga. He collapsed at work on an ordinary Tuesday and did not survive the ambulance ride. He left behind his wife Harpreet, a retail worker at a big-box store, and two children under ten. Like most people their age, they had never gotten around to writing wills. They owned a townhouse with a mortgage, a joint chequing account, Raymond's workplace pension death benefit, and a car. Between the home's equity in a Mississauga market that had risen steadily since they bought, the pension benefit, and their savings, the total estate value, once the mortgage and debts were accounted for, came to roughly $260,000.

Harpreet assumed, reasonably, that as Raymond's wife everything would simply come to her. That is how many people picture it. It is not how Ontario law actually works when someone dies without a will, and the gap between the assumption and the rule is where this case sits.

What the intestacy rules actually said

When a person dies without a valid will in Ontario, they are said to have died "intestate," and the Succession Law Reform Act supplies a fixed distribution scheme in place of one. It does not ask what the deceased would have wanted. It applies the same formula to every family in the same shape.

Under that formula, a surviving spouse is entitled to a preferential share — a set first slice of the estate — before anything else is divided. Where there are also children, the remainder above that preferential share is split between the spouse and the children according to a fixed ratio, with the children's portions held in trust until they reach adulthood. Harpreet did not get the whole $260,000. She received the preferential share plus a portion of what was left; the rest was allocated to the two children in equal shares, to be held for them rather than paid to Harpreet as their mother.

This came as a genuine shock. Harpreet had assumed she could keep the family finances exactly as they had run them — one household budget, one set of decisions. Instead, roughly a third of the estate had to be set aside as money that legally belonged to her children, not to her, and that she could not simply spend on rent or groceries without going through a formal process to justify the withdrawal.

There was a second complication. Raymond's mother, Fiona, had assumed that as his parent she would also be entitled to something — she had helped raise him and felt she had a claim. Under the intestacy formula, a surviving spouse and children take the entire estate between them; parents and siblings only inherit if there is no surviving spouse or descendant. Fiona was entitled to nothing from the estate, and having to explain that to her, on top of everything else, fell to Harpreet in the middle of her grief.

What we did

1. Applied for a certificate of appointment of estate trustee without a will. Because Raymond left no will naming an executor, Harpreet had no automatic authority to deal with his assets, close accounts, or sell the car. We prepared and filed the application to the Superior Court to have her formally appointed as estate trustee, which gives an administrator the same legal authority a named executor would have had.
2. Arranged the required administration bond. When someone dies without a will, the court generally requires the estate trustee to post a bond — an insurance-backed guarantee that protects beneficiaries, including the minor children, if the trustee mismanages the estate. A will can waive this requirement; intestacy cannot. We arranged the bond through a surety provider, which added a cost the estate had to absorb and a delay of several weeks while it was underwritten.
3. Calculated the preferential share and the children's entitlement correctly. Getting this arithmetic wrong is one of the most common errors in intestate estates, and it exposes the trustee personally if beneficiaries are overpaid or underpaid. We worked through the formula against the actual asset values — the townhouse equity after the mortgage and sale costs, the pension death benefit, and the bank accounts — to confirm exactly what Harpreet was entitled to keep and what had to be set aside for the children.
4. Set up a proper trust structure for the children's shares. Rather than leaving the children's money in a way that would trigger involvement from the Office of the Children's Lawyer or require court applications every time Harpreet needed to draw on it for the kids' expenses, we structured the funds in a trust account with clear, documented terms for permitted uses — school costs, medical expenses, activities — so Harpreet could access what the children actually needed without repeated court applications, while the bulk of the principal stayed protected until each child turns eighteen.
5. Explained the outcome to Fiona in writing. To head off a dispute born of confusion rather than any real legal claim, we set out plainly, with reference to the statutory scheme, why a surviving spouse and children exclude a parent from an intestate estate. Fiona did not contest it once she understood the rule applied the same way to every family, not just theirs.

The outcome

The estate was settled correctly and without a court dispute. Harpreet kept the family home's equity within her share, closed out the accounts, and has ongoing, documented access to the children's trust funds for their actual needs. But the honest accounting is that this family lost real money and real time to the absence of a will. The bond alone cost several thousand dollars that a will would have avoided entirely, since a named executor can typically be excused from posting one. The court process to be appointed trustee took a couple of months longer than probating a straightforward will would have, during which Harpreet could not access most of the accounts to pay the mortgage and had to draw down savings.

Most significantly, roughly a third of a $260,000 estate is now locked away for two children for the better part of a decade, rather than being available to their mother to manage the household in the way Raymond would almost certainly have wanted. A will naming Harpreet as sole beneficiary, or setting more flexible terms for the children's inheritance, would have kept that money working for the family in the meantime. None of that can be undone now. What could be controlled was making sure the process that followed was handled correctly, on time, and without adding legal costs on top of an already difficult year — and that part went as well as it could.

What you can learn from this