The Default Heir In 1540, Henry VIII's Parliament gave English landowners the right to decide who would inherit their property after death. Before that act, land followed blood; a person's wishes played almost no role. The act did not remove the old rules. It made them a fallback. Nearly five centuries later, that fallback still runs silently beneath the modern economy, ready to distribute the savings, cars and smartphones of anyone who dies without making their own choice. Erin Atkinson made her own choices at 27. She works in psychological research at a London university and moved to the capital from Bristol four years ago. She rents. She does not describe herself as particularly wealthy. Even so, her £7,000 car will go to her sister. A gold necklace from her partner will go back to him. Some of her money will go to an endometriosis charity. "At first it felt quite surreal because you associate wills with older people," she says. "One thing that's close to my heart is an endometriosis charity. It felt really empowering that I could have that written down to say I want X amount donated." For many young people, the association with age is exactly the problem. The 2025 National Wills Report found that just one in five 18 to 24-year-olds has a will in place. That share rises to 33% of 22 to 34-year-olds. It reaches 56% among people aged over 55. The gap suggests that will-writing is treated as a later-life task, not a life task. Why would a tenant with modest savings pay for a legal document that only takes effect after death? The first answer is that an estate is larger than most people think. Sophia Maslin, the founder of Morby, an app that lets people create wills online, says one of the biggest misconceptions she meets is the belief that you need to own a lot before writing a will. "People believe they don't own enough," she says. "But actually, if you've got some sort of savings, investments, pensions, your social media accounts, if you've got pets, even funeral wishes, these are all things to think about." The second answer is that intestacy - dying without a valid will - is expensive in ways that have nothing to do with the value of the estate. When someone dies intestate, no one is automatically authorised to act. Banks will usually not take instructions from a parent, sibling or partner who lacks legal standing. Debts must be settled from the estate before anyone inherits. Someone has to close the accounts, cancel the contracts and deal with the tax. A will names that person in advance. Eleanor Hodgson, a solicitor at Crombie Wilkinson, puts it plainly: "It's not just your assets that it helps because there's still someone that has to deal with your bank accounts and any debts you have, and it's [being] able to name a person that can legally deal with that without having to jump through hoops." Without a named person, the law supplies its own order. Intestacy rules follow a hierarchy that generally places a spouse or civil partner and children ahead of parents, siblings and more distant relatives. An unmarried partner, no matter how long the relationship lasted, has no automatic place in that order. If no relative can be found, the estate can pass to the Crown as bona vacantia - ownerless goods. The state, in other words, is the heir of last resort. Most young people never learn this until a death in the family delivers them to the machine from the inside. Erin's decision did not begin with a lawyer. It began when a friend bought a home, and property made the question of inheritance feel concrete. Then she saw Maslin on TikTok telling the story of a cousin who died young without a will, and of how complicated things became for the family left behind. [2] Then her grandmother died with a will, and Erin watched what a carefully directive document can spare a large family. "Seeing the will written in a way that was very directive showed me you can take a lot of pressure off the family," she says. The process also revealed assets Erin had not counted, such as premium bonds. More importantly, she says, it was not about expecting the worst. "It was about taking responsibility and making life easier for the people I care about." [Pic1] That is the part of estate planning that statistics miss. A will distributes money, but it also distributes instructions. Erin has asked for a poem to be read at her funeral. She has specified the drink she would like served. Those lines carry no financial value. Without them, the people who grieve would have to guess. Grief is a bad moment for guesswork. How hard is it to write a will? The process looks daunting, and a solicitor's fee can feel high when the estate feels small. Every November, however, Will Aid links people with solicitors who volunteer their time and waive their fee for writing a basic will. [1] Online services such as Morby have also removed the need for an office appointment and a folder of paperwork. The barrier, therefore, is not money alone. Behavioural economists call the remaining barrier present bias: humans discount future events, and the further away the event, the deeper the discount. A death at 80 is a future event; a death at 27 is almost unimaginable - until a friend buys a home, or a cousin dies young, or a grandmother's will shows what a document can do. Pension policy learned this lesson: automatic enrolment worked not by persuading people to save, but by making the default do the work. Inheritance law runs the other way: for someone who writes nothing, the default distribution is written by the state. A will is the instrument that replaces the state's defaults with the writer's own choices. The instrument does not need to be long. It needs to name the beneficiaries: the people who receive the money and possessions. It needs to name an executor, the person who will make sure those wishes are carried out; an executor can be a trusted family member or a solicitor, but a solicitor may charge a fee. If there are children under 18, a will can name guardians for them. For pet owners, it can say who should take the animal. It can record funeral preferences, from burial or cremation to music, readings and flowers. Then it must be kept somewhere safe, and someone trusted must know where, because a will that cannot be found can cause delays and may mean the wishes are not followed. Hodgson adds the caution that hangs over the whole subject: the difficulties of not having a will are hard to appreciate until the time comes. Maslin puts the urgency in fewer words: "The reality is that unexpected things happen at every stage of life." Those two sentences contain the economics of the decision. The people who can best appreciate intestacy are those who have already lived through it, and the people who can still prevent it are those who have not. That mismatch is not a legal problem; the law is stable. It is a problem of imagination, and imagination cannot be summoned by a court order. Erin Atkinson wrote her will at 27, not because she expects the worst, but because she has seen what a document can spare the people she loves. What keeps researchers of this subject awake is the gap that remains: the majority of people in their twenties and thirties who have not written theirs yet, and who will still be governed, when the time comes, by a default designed in another century.
EconPol
Who Inherits When You Die Without a Will
