Writing a Will: The Thing Older Parents Should Do First

I kept not writing a will for two years after Ellie was born.

I was aware I should do it. I had been aware of this from approximately the moment I saw the line on the pregnancy test, which is a significant cognitive shift — the moment when "I should probably sort that" becomes "not having sorted that is a decision I am actively making every day." I was making that decision, daily, by not acting on the awareness.

The reasons I gave myself were several: I would do it when things settled down; I would do it properly, with a solicitor, not with an online form; I needed to think about guardians first; the guardians question was complicated; I would come back to it. These are all, I now understand, the rationalised forms of the real reason, which is that writing a will requires you to spend focused time imagining your absence, and imagining your absence when you have a six-month-old is not something your nervous system greets with enthusiasm.

I wrote the will when Ellie was two. It took three hours across two evenings and cost £140 with an online solicitor service.

The three hours and £140 have not been in the top five hundred hardest things I have done since becoming a father.

Why it matters more as an older parent

The case for any parent writing a will is clear and I do not need to make it here — it exists wherever you look for it. The case for an older parent is more specific.

The age gap between you and your children is larger. If something happened to both you and your partner, the question of guardianship matters in a different way when your children are five and two than when they are fifteen and twelve. Young children need, practically and emotionally, a long-term arrangement, not just someone to hold the fort.

The financial picture is more complex. You may have a property, a pension with complex nomination rules, savings in various wrappers, a small business if you are self-employed. The default rules of intestacy — what happens when there is no will — are not designed for this complexity.

The mortality awareness that comes with being an older parent is real. The gap between awareness and action was two years in my case. The action took one evening and resolved two years of low-grade background weight.

The questions the will forced me to answer

The guardianship question. Who raises your children if you and your partner both die? This is the question I had been avoiding because the answer is not obvious and requires a real conversation with real people. It required me to have that conversation with my sister-in-law and her husband, which was strange and necessary and ultimately fine. They said yes. We talked through what that would mean. The conversation was a gift, actually — it made explicit an arrangement that had been vaguely assumed and gave it the weight of something considered.

The financial guardian question — which can be different from the guardianship question. Who manages the money until your children are adults?

The letter of wishes. Most will services encourage you to write this alongside the legal document: informal guidance about what you would want for your children's upbringing, education, any specific wishes that cannot be legally enforced but matter to you. I spent longer on this than on the will itself. It is not a legal document. It is a letter to the people who might raise your children. Writing it is clarifying in a way I did not anticipate.

The practical route

I used a solicitor-checked online will service. There are several: Farewill, Kwill, Solicitors.guru. I used Farewill, paid £90 for a single will, and the draft was reviewed by a qualified solicitor. It took under two hours to complete online.

For more complex estates — significant assets, business interests, complex family situations — I would recommend a high-street solicitor rather than an online service. The cost is typically £150–300 per will.

Whatever you use: write it, sign it with two witnesses who are not beneficiaries, store it somewhere your partner knows about. We used a fireproof document box with copies sent to both sets of parents.

Review it when things change. We reviewed it after Sam was born to update the guardian arrangements and add him.

The thing I want to say directly

If you are reading this and you have children and you do not have a will: write the will.

Not this week. Today, if possible. Book the forty minutes to start the online form. The avoidance of it is costing you a background weight that the action will remove. The action is less hard than the avoidance.

The imagined difficulty of writing a will significantly exceeds the actual difficulty. I know this because I spent two years imagining the difficulty and an evening experiencing it.

The will is done. The children are named. The guardians are arranged. The letter of wishes is written and says the things I want said.

I feel, about this, the specific relief of a person who has closed a background process that was consuming resources without producing output. The system is running more cleanly.

Get it done.