You would think I would know better.

As an investigative journalist, I once spent months working on a series of articles about what happens to the estates of people who die without wills. It can be ugly. In New York City, politically connected lawyers, judges and contractors can, as our reporting team found, feed on these unguarded estates like leeches on flesh at a nudist camp lake.

In one typical case, my colleagues and I at The New York Post found that a Queens Surrogate’s Court judge had appointed three lawyers connected to the local Democratic Party as “guardians” of potential heirs to the estate of a never-married, childless woman. Ostensibly in search of heirs, they spent part of the deceased woman’s $670,000 estate on a junket to Puerto Rico for themselves, a court employee and their spouses. In the end, the highest-paid lawyer siphoned off $116,025 in fees, while the dead woman’s 14 cousins received inheritances of $33,150 each.

We worked our tails off on these articles back in 1998. At the end of the workday, I would return to the co-op apartment I had bought downtown for around $100,000 a year earlier. Single, I would sort through my mail, reading paycheck stubs noting that I was dutifully funneling 5 percent of my paycheck into a 401(k) matched by my employer.

And if I had been run over by a taxi (or a vengeful Queens lawyer) and killed, the same vultures would be free to feed on my estate — because I was just like one of the unfortunates we had written about. I didn’t have a will.