Why the administration process could be longer / costlier if you die without a Will?

Part of the process in applying for the Letter of Administration requires every other “beneficiaries” (who because are receiving something from the Estate and hence are eligible to be an Administrator themselves) to renounce that they do not want to be the Administrator. The issue is magnified when the other beneficiaries are stuck overseas, an issue which we personally witness during the Covid-19 period. There might also be disagreements between who that trusted individual(s) is, ending up to be resolved through litigation. This is as compared to having a Will where the Executor is already pre-decided and hence no renunciation is needed.

Presuming the best case scenario, the one who applied is the one whom you trust and coincidentally without objections from anyone else, does he also magically know all the asset details for the application? Part of the process involves filing the Schedule of Assets, which includes the identifying details (e.g. bank account number) and estimated market value, which is provided that the individual knows the assets even exist to begin with. In Singapore, there are hundreds of millions of unclaimed assets, don’t let yours be part of these statistics. Even in the case where you roughly know what and where these assets are, without a properly done Will you still need to pay that extra hundreds of dollars per asset to get a lawyer to fill up the missing details.