PSA: Having a will is not just if you are old. Every one should have one and if your affairs are straight forward you may be able to it yourself with a kit.
Makes things easier for when you're gone. You'll probably have some next of kin, even if you're on bad terms with them.
If you die without a will, the state ends up determining what happens with your possessions. That usually means that they'll go down a list of relatives and ask them "hey, this person died, do you want to inherit their belongings". If they find absolutely nobody (this happens a lot with people that die with a lot of debt, since you also inherit the debt), the will instead falls to the state.
The order makes some sense (first is spouse, then kids, then siblings, then direct family and finally extended family), but it's of course something left up to the present state of the law and depending on how that might change, something could occur you're not happy with.
One specific example of this (albeit not for your case) is in the event you're gay; gay people often had to prepare their will specifically because the state wouldn't acknowledge them as the spouse (this was even with the "civil arrangements"), so the state would just skip over their spouse for inheritance and relinquish stuff to their family instead.
This doesn't apply of course if you're not married, but it's one simple example in how that default order might have some asterisks that are easily avoidable if you just have a will.
Basically it's useful to have one to avoid a lot of complications in the event of an untimely death (which can happen for all sorts of reasons).
You do not necessarily have to inherit the debt, even if you don't know about it beforehand. Where I live that is called 'accepting an inheritance beneficially', it may have a different legal term where you live. The essence is that you only accept the inheritance if, and only if it brings you a net benefit and otherwise you reject it. Usually this costs a few units of your local currency to arrange.
Note that all this stuff can get very complex in a hurry especially when taxes are involved (and they usually are) so you should definitely hire the help of a professional when dealing with this for anything exceeding a few thousand.
> Makes things easier for when you're gone. ... even if you're on bad terms with them.
Thanks for your detailed answer. You haven't convinced me it is important either way, but I at least know now that I havent missed something important.
It seems like you've only made the case for people who don't like the standard list of inheritors or for gay people, not everyone like you mentioned before.
Regardless, if you like the standard list of inheritors, it's still worth writing it down. That means that the executor of your will knows that that is the order you prefer. Laws can be changed at any point and it could say, be changed in order to prioritize your parents over your siblings; if you don't care at all about what happens with your belongings after your death, yeah fair, there's nothing I could do to convince you, but for anyone else that's worth taking into account. Having it explicitly spelled out in your will ensures that that doesn't change, even if the law does.
Gay people was just an example of what might seem sensible on paper could still have a strange asterisk attached to it.
If you went to the trouble to accumulate resources in life you might find it interesting to give some of it to your friends. If anything, I could see the argument that someone doesn't really need a will if one has kids or a spouse as they would get everything by default anyway, and the will us just a way of carving it apart, whether for tax reasons or to prevent infighting... but if you don't have family then without a will your belongings are essentially forfeit :(. I definitely have people in my life whom I want to receive my assets when I die (though I also haven't taken the time to make a will, despite it coming up weirdly often... I think the universe might be hinting at me).
If you're married then pretty much everything goes to the spouse by default. Kids, likewise, are usually a default inheritor as well. Can get messy if you have a bunch of kids, but the default is usually an even split.
But what happens if you don't have a spouse or kids? Do you want that cash to go to a charity? To your shitty relative who you don't like? You gotta make it explicit.
That is a pretty good argument for having a will, indeed.
For me personally, I am not attached to the concept of cash/assets enough to really care what happens with excess assets after I am gone.
It is something entirely different if you have offspring, and want to pass accumulated assets to them, I get that. However, given how much money was printed recently, all the cash I leave behind might as well be burnt, I really dont care either way. If I have friends in need, I might as well pass some of it on to them before I go.
Because otherwise you may find that your estate goes to the state, when in fact you want it to go somewhere else. Subject to the inheritance rules in your legal arena, which can vary considerably.
