09 - 08 - 2026

Why every Indian family needs an Estate Plan Stress Test?

American author, Ambrose ‘Bitter’ Bierce once wrote: “Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.”

For today’s wealthy India, such cynicism in the concurrent familial systems may seem hyperbolized, but the irony is not entirely lost on our generation which has seen several high-profile legal battles over succession and inheritance disputes. You may argue that nothing of the sort could happen in your ‘very middle-class’ family.

The fact you are earning much more than your previous generations itself is a sign of things to come. This makes you and your family apt candidates to conduct a periodic Estate Stress Test to ensure that any eventuality would not lead to a family dispute or split of assets, you spent a lifetime building.

A new kind of stress test

With Indian families increasingly pouring life savings into real estate, gold, mutual funds, shares, insurance and even cryptos besides overseas assets, individuals have to confront the question – what happens to these assets when I am no longer around to manage it?” Here, a stress test will help you understand – who inherits what? who can access the assets? are nominations and the Will aligned? Who should manage the wealth? is there enough liquidity? And whether any discord would lead to a family or business dispute?

Many of you would retort, saying in India, you don’t necessarily need an estate-tax stress test – what you may need is more of a family-conflict stress test. Agree with the argument to an extent as we have no inheritance tax today, but does that make estate planning less important?

Global wealth managers such as Northern Trust, BMO Private Wealth and HSBC Private Banking encourage clients to conduct the Estate Plan Stress Test—with a simple question: Will your family’s financial life continue smoothly if something unexpected happens tomorrow?

Here, we have to add – how will you ensure that the accumulated wealth can be transferred, accessed and managed as intended and without legal liabilities? Will the spouse know where investments are held?

Can children access digital accounts and will siblings agree on dividing property? One must check few facts before ruling out the idea in its entirety; for example, have you checked if your nominees in key assets are outdated or updated. Is your Will smartly done to survive family complexities?

India is growing at a healthy pace, creating wealth at an unprecedented speed. Industry surveys show that the country has added about 4.6 lakh millionaire households between 2020 and 2025 to reach a total of 8.71 lakh – at unimpressive rate of 111%. No doubt, our wealth pyramid has been expanding for some time.

In 2021, the country had about 9.1 crore households identified as ‘middle class’ with an upper annual income level of Rs 30 lakhs. In cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi NCR, many families own apartments worth Rs 4-5 crore, at least Rs 1 crore in retirement corpus, more in insurance policies, stocks and mutual funds and digital investments – totalling easily up to Rs 10 crore and above. Now, at that standard, it deserves protection.

As it continues to grow and accumulate, without proper planning and testing, families may end up wasting often spend months—or even years—getting succession certificates, probate or resolving inheritance disputes.

We may borrow some ideas from the regulators to conduct an annual and occasional health checks on our investment portfolios to understand our own “estate readiness.” Keep an Estate Readiness Score handy to make sure that your wealth does exactly what it was meant to do: protect the family and not burden it.

Sreevalsan M.