WHETHER you have enough money to live out your golden years comfortably. What will happen if you need care in your old age. Whether you have a will and where it’s stored.
These are all things that make you confront the fact that you’re going to get old and die one day – which is why we generally avoid talking about them.
You may consider these to be private matters, nobody’s business but your own. And while they generally are, the fact of the matter is they’re all things that can affect your life in a major way. If you have children, it’ll affect their lives too.
When her 68-year-old father died, it came as a shock to Shané Abrahams* and her siblings. While he’d been ill for a while, they didn’t expect him to die so suddenly.
Her parents divorced many years ago and while Shané, the eldest, had a great relationship with her dad, they hadn’t had a single conversation about the state of his affairs, or where his will and other important documents were stored. “It just always seemed like we had time left,” she says.
Then he suddenly became seriously ill and had to be hospitalised.
