How do I ask about inheritance without looking greedy?

The five questions that are about the family, not the money

Does a will exist. Where is the original held. Who is named executor. Is there a Lasting Power of Attorney, and who is the donee. Who can sign for the company and the bank accounts if he is in hospital for six weeks. Every one of these is an operating question — the sort a bank asks about key-man risk, an auditor asks about governance, and an insurer asks before writing a policy. None of them requires him to disclose a single figure or a single name of a beneficiary. A father who will not discuss contents will very often answer all five, because answering them costs him nothing and settles something he has also been quietly worrying about.

The framing that works is the one that puts you in the position of the person who would have to act, not the person who would receive. If you are in hospital next month, who signs the payroll. If the bank calls the family office on a Friday, who has authority. If something happens to you while you are travelling, who do we call and what do we show them. Asked that way, the questions are about his continuity, not his mortality — and they are the same questions, which is the point. Wanting to know your position is stewardship, not greed; the private meaning stays private.

What Singapore records — so an answer can be verified rather than argued

The Wills Registry is maintained by the Singapore Academy of Law, which took the service over from the Public Trustee's Office with effect from 4 May 2020. It is voluntary and deliberately narrow: it records the testator's details, the date of the will, who drew it up, and where the original is held. It does not keep the original signed will; a digital copy is held only for deposits made through participating law firms.

Depositing a will record costs S$50 per submission and a search costs S$10 per submission; a search requires the testator's identification number, the searcher's declared relationship to the testator, and supporting documents. Because registration is voluntary, an empty result does not prove there is no will — but a result ends the drawer-by-drawer hunt in the worst week the family will ever have.

The Lasting Power of Attorney sits in a separate register. Section 31 of the Mental Capacity Act 2008 makes it one of the Public Guardian's statutory functions to establish and maintain a register of Lasting Powers of Attorney, a register of orders appointing deputies, and a register of professional deputies.

An LPA is made by a donor aged at least 21 who appoints one or more donees over personal welfare, property and affairs, or both; the donee can only transact once a registered medical practitioner has certified that the donor has lost mental capacity, and must step aside if capacity returns. From 1 April 2026 Singapore Citizens can apply using LPA Form 1 free of charge, and from 1 May 2026 all other Form 1 and Form 2 applications carry reduced fees — 98 per cent of Singapore Citizens who have made an LPA used Form 1.

The Government's own planning portal, MyLegacy@LifeSG, walks a person through the will, the CPF nomination and the LPA in that order, which is a useful thing to be able to point at instead of pointing at yourself.

The base rate makes the question ordinary: one in seven citizens has an LPA, and Form 1 is now free

On 5 March 2026 the Ministry of Social and Family Development told Parliament, in reply to Mr Yip Hon Weng, that 404,000 Singapore citizens — about one in seven — had made a Lasting Power of Attorney as at 20 February 2026, and that among citizens aged 65 and above the figure was 197,000, about one in four. The same reply made LPA Form 1 free of charge for all citizens permanently, in place of the fee waiver that had been due to end on 31 March 2026. Read plainly: three of every four fathers over 65 have not made one, so a son who asks whether his has is not suggesting anything unusual. He is asking about a form that now costs nothing.

The Office of the Public Guardian's release of 1 September 2025, marking fifteen years of the office, gives the wider picture: over 350,000 LPAs among citizens as at 15 August 2025, about 1.8 million CPF nominations — the release says four in five who pass away would have made one — and more than 80,000 Advance Care Plans. The gap between the CPF figure and the LPA figure is the conversation this page is about. Most families have completed the one that a form at the CPF Board prompts, and not the one that requires a decision about who acts. The question 'is there an LPA' names that gap without naming any sum.

The one question to leave unasked

What do I get has no honest answer while he is alive. A will speaks only at death and can be rewritten the following morning, so any number he gives you is provisional, and both of you know it. Worse, the question changes the register of the conversation permanently: it converts a family discussion into a negotiation, and once it is a negotiation everyone in the room starts positioning, including the people who were not positioning before. This is the mechanism by which a family that was merely uncommunicative becomes a family that is adversarial, and it is almost always the heir who supplies the spark.

The cost of never asking anything at all is, unusually, measurable. Studying 217 Chinese-family-controlled publicly listed companies across Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, Joseph Fan of CUHK and Morten Bennedsen of INSEAD tracked share prices from five years before the founder stepped down to three years after the successor took over, and found around 60 per cent of firm value lost across that window. That destruction is not caused by heirs asking questions. It is caused by nobody asking them in time — the handover arriving as an event rather than as a plan. The five questions above are the cheapest available insurance against being in that dataset.

Timing: attach the question to an event, never to him

The conversation lands when it is triggered by something outside the family. A bank or a lender raising key-man risk. An auditor's management letter. A new grandchild. A property purchase that needs a signature. A friend's family that has just spent two years in probate. Each of these lets you ask the five questions as a response to a circumstance rather than as an initiative of your own, which is the entire difference between a prudent son and an impatient one in the way it will be remembered.

Expect one of three answers. He answers, and the family is further along than it was. He says it is not your business, in which case the questions have still been heard and can be repeated once, later, attached to a different event. Or he says it is all arranged — which is the most common answer and the least informative, because company shareholdings, property titles and the existence of a will record are all checkable from outside without his permission. See the page on what you can actually check when the answer is that everything is already arranged.