The People Caring for Everyone Else Are the Least Likely to Have a Will

Relative Ease News · November 3, 2026

On November 2, Willful released The Great Delay 2026, its annual survey of how the cost of living is reshaping Canadians' financial plans. This year, for the first time, it looked separately at the sandwich generation: adults with at least one living parent and a child, about 24% of the Canadian population. They are the hardest-working planners in the country. They are also the most likely to have skipped the one document that protects everyone depending on them.

Doing more, delaying more

The sandwich generation completed financial to-dos at the highest rate of any group: 81% finished at least one in 2026, compared with 77% of Canadians overall. About 42% hold their own life insurance, compared with 34% overall, and 40% hold an education savings plan for their children, compared with 16% overall.

And yet 63% of them also delayed at least one major financial milestone this year, compared with 55% nationally. The item that slipped most was their own estate plan. About 65% of sandwich-generation Canadians do not have a will, higher than the 58% of Canadians overall who remain without one, a figure the report says has been largely unchanged for three years. Only 23% have power of attorney documents, compared with 27% overall. They were also more likely than anyone else to delay estate planning this year, at 21% versus 15%.

Erin Bury, Willful's co-founder and CEO, who describes herself as part of this generation, put it plainly: "You can't control gas prices or the economy. You can control whether your will is done. It's the one to-do on the list that protects everyone else on it."

The same gap shows up in the United States

This is not only a Canadian pattern. Trust & Will's 2026 Estate Planning Report, based on a national survey of 5,000 U.S. adults conducted January 28 through February 5, 2026, found that 56% of U.S. adults have no estate planning documents at all: no will, no trust, no medical or financial power of attorney, and no HIPAA authorization. The least protected generation was Gen X, the group most likely to be raising children while helping aging parents: 62% have no documents, higher than Gen Z (54%), Millennials (58%), or Baby Boomers (48%). Will ownership in the U.S. actually fell in a single year, from 31% in 2025 to 26% in 2026.

The two surveys used different questions in different countries, so the percentages are not directly interchangeable. The shape is the same in both: the adults carrying the most responsibility for other people, in both directions, are the ones whose own paperwork is most likely to be missing.

Why this group cannot afford the gap

A missing will hurts any family. For a sandwich-generation household, it hurts in two directions at once. Consider a generic example: a parent of two school-age children, who also checks in daily on an aging mother, dies without a will. No guardian has been named for the children, so that decision falls to a court. No executor has been chosen, so relatives must sort out who steps forward while also arranging care for the grandmother whose support system just disappeared. Nothing about that scenario requires wealth, conflict, or bad intentions. It only requires a plan that was always meant to be done later.

Respondents seem to understand the cost. In the Willful survey, 74% of sandwich-generation Canadians said a parent or family member dying without a will would cause stress in the family, compared with 63% of Canadians overall, and 59% said it would make financial and legal tasks difficult to manage, compared with 51% overall. In the U.S. survey, 42% of adults said they would not know what to do if a family member died today, rising to 56% among those with no estate planning documents.

The conversation is not the finish line

One finding deserves special attention. In Canada, 24% of the sandwich generation have talked through an emergency plan with their family but never put documents in place, nearly double the rate of other Canadians. Overall, 63% of Canadians are not fully prepared for a financial emergency, meaning they have not both had the conversation and completed the paperwork. Only 28% have done both. Talking helps, but a conversation cannot name a legal guardian, appoint an executor, or give a hospital a directive it can act on.

What to finish first

If you are caring for children and a parent at the same time, the order matters less than finishing. Make or update a will naming a guardian for minor children and an executor you trust. Add financial and health care powers of attorney, so someone can act for you while you are alive but unable to act yourself. Ask your parents the question you would want your children to ask you: do you have a will, and where is it kept? Then tell your family where your documents are. That last step, knowing where the plan lives, is exactly what a tool like Relative Ease's free locker is built for, alongside its directory of licensed estate planning professionals. The surveys agree on the hard part: it is not that caregivers do not care. It is that everyone else's needs keep going first.

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