After 30 years in the South African employee benefits environment – retirement funds, group life and disability cover, funeral cover, and the processes that follow when a claim needs to be paid – I have seen what happens when the practical groundwork hasn’t been laid.

I have watched families wait months, sometimes years, for benefits to be paid, not because of legal failures, but because information was missing, documents couldn’t be found or nominations had not been updated. In many cases, those delays fell hardest on the people who could least afford to wait.

As many people do, I have experienced a few deaths in my life – three of them were very close to me and I was therefore involved in all kinds of matters relating to their deaths. Let me use my parents as examples of how different estates can be. My father was a military man – organised, methodical and prepared. When he died unexpectedly, everything was in order. It made an impossibly hard time just a little more bearable. My mother was remarkable in her own right, a woman who could turn her hand to almost anything. Admin, however, was simply not her thing and a long illness made it even harder to stay on top of. When the time came, the contrast was something that stayed with me.

Losing someone is hard enough. Sometimes a lot of work, pain and heartache precedes a death and having to struggle through avoidable chaos on top of that is something I believe we can spare the people we care for.

That belief is what ertha is built on.