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The complete estate planning guide - South Australia
You have spent your life building this. Have you spent one hour protecting it?
Most South Australian families haven't. And when something goes wrong, it's their family who pay the price.
If you own a home, have children, run a business, or simply have people you love - you need to read this before something happens that makes it too late.
Let me tell you what actually happens when there is no estate plan.
Not the polite version. The real version.
A woman in her forties dies unexpectedly. She has two children from her first marriage and a partner she has been with for eight years. They were never married. She has a home, superannuation, and a small business. She has been meaning to do a Will for years.
She never got around to it.
Her partner has no legal right to anything. He cannot access their joint account. He cannot make decisions about the house they shared. He cannot even make her funeral arrangements without a dispute.
Her superannuation - her largest asset - goes where her fund's trustee decides, not where she would have chosen. Her children's inheritance passes to them outright. At ages eleven and fourteen.
Her business? Without a succession plan and without someone holding a Company Power of Attorney, it effectively ceases to operate the day she dies.
This is not a worst-case scenario. This is what happens every day to families who meant to get around to it.
What most South Australian families get wrong about Estate Planning
They think a Will is enough.
A Will only deals with what happens when you die. It does nothing - absolutely nothing - to protect you if you lose capacity through an accident, an illness, or a medical emergency. For that you need an Enduring Power of Attorney and an Advance Care Directive. Without them, your family has no legal authority to act on your behalf. They must apply to SACAT - the South Australian Civil and Administrative Tribunal - and wait weeks for a decision while your affairs cannot be managed.
They think their assets automatically go to their family.
They do not. Superannuation - often the largest asset a person owns - does not pass through your Will unless you have made a valid binding death benefit nomination. If your nomination has lapsed or was never made, the trustee of your super fund decides who receives it. That may not be who you would have chosen.
They think a basic Will protects their children.
It does not. A standard Will leaves assets directly to your children. The moment those assets are in their hands, they are exposed - to relationship breakdown, to creditors, to poor decisions made young, to a future you cannot predict. A testamentary trust changes that entirely. It is the structure that keeps what you leave your children actually protected. Most SA families have never been told it exists.
They think marriage automatically revokes their old Will.
It does - and most people do not know it. Under the Wills Act 1936 (SA), marriage automatically revokes a Will made before the marriage unless the Will was made in contemplation of that marriage. If you married and did not make a new Will, you have no valid Will. You are intestate. The government formula applies to you regardless of what you wanted.
They think separation revokes gifts to an ex-partner.
Divorce does - but separation does not. If you separated from a de facto partner and never updated your Will, they may still be entitled to benefit from your estate. The law does not make this correction automatically.
Introducing: The Complete Estate Planning Guide - South Australia
Everything You Need to Know to Protect Your Family, Your Assets, and Your Legacy
A practical legal guide for South Australians under the Wills Act 1936 (SA) and Succession Act 2023 (SA)
Written by Zoe Goode - Solicitor, Estate Planning Lawyer, and Principal of Goode & Co Lawyers based on the Limestone Coast & Mount Gambier Region.
This is not a generic estate planning checklist.
This is a comprehensive, plain-English guide to every element of a complete South Australian estate plan - written by a lawyer who has seen what happens to families when each piece is missing.
Why listen to Zoe Goode?
Zoe Goode is the Principal Lawyer of Goode & Co Lawyers, an estate planning and family law practice based on the Limestone Coast and Mount Gambier Region, South Australia, working with SA families in person and with clients across Australia online.
She has sat across from people at their most vulnerable - families dealing with the consequences of plans that were never made, or made years ago and never reviewed.
She has seen what happens when a testamentary trust was not put in place. When a Power of Attorney did not exist. When a superannuation nomination had lapsed a decade earlier.
She wrote this guide because the families who suffer most are almost always the ones who simply did not know what they did not know.
The Guide is free. The gaps it reveals are not
Download it today. Read it this week.
Because the people who put estate planning off are not selfish or careless. They are busy. They are overwhelmed. They are managing everything else.
But the consequences of leaving it undone fall entirely on the people they love most.
Your family deserves better than a government formula and a legal mess.
And you deserve the peace of mind that comes from knowing it is sorted.
