Families and Legacy

A plan based only on today's fees will underestimate tomorrow's bill. School and university fees have historically risen faster than general inflation and, in many cases, faster than salary growth, which means a contribution plan set once and left unreviewed quietly falls behind every year.

The useful starting point is the full education timeline for every child, not just the next fee statement: how many years remain until each child starts and finishes their schooling and any tertiary study, and what fee inflation assumption is realistic given the specific institutions in mind. From there, compare that funding need against current cash flow and the role existing investments are already expected to play in the wider plan.

The contribution path that looked comfortable when the youngest child started primary school may need to change materially by the time they reach secondary school. Testing the plan against updated numbers, rather than the assumptions made years earlier, is what keeps education funding realistic instead of aspirational.

A will can nominate a guardian for your children. It cannot, by itself, hand that guardian a workable structure for managing money on the children's behalf, and the gap between the two is where families run into difficulty.

Guardianship and financial control are separate questions that need separate answers. Who is nominated to raise the children day to day, and have they actually agreed to it? Who controls any inheritance, trust or policy proceeds intended for the children, and is that the same person as the guardian, or someone else entirely? Does a trust structure exist to hold and manage assets until the children reach an appropriate age, rather than leaving a lump sum to be administered directly?

These questions should be reviewed together: the guardianship nomination, any testamentary or existing trust, life cover and its beneficiary nominations, and the practical, day-to-day needs of the children, from school fees to housing. Reviewed separately, each piece can look complete while the whole plan still leaves a gap nobody intended.

Who actually receives life-cover proceeds, and how quickly, depends on details that are easy to overlook: who owns the policy, who is nominated as beneficiary, what the cover was originally intended to achieve, and how the wider estate is structured around it.

A policy nominated directly to a beneficiary generally pays outside the deceased estate, which can mean faster access to cash when a family needs it most. A policy paid into the estate instead becomes part of the broader estate administration, which can take considerably longer to finalise. Neither approach is automatically correct; it depends on what the cover is meant to fund and who needs the money first.

Reviewing policy ownership and beneficiary nominations alongside overall estate liquidity, rather than treating each policy as a standalone product, is what ensures immediate family needs are met on a realistic timeline rather than left to assumptions nobody has tested. This is worth revisiting whenever a policy is taken out, amended or replaced, since ownership and nomination details are easy to leave unchanged after a life event.