FAQs

 There are a number of ‘packs’ available, or you can write out your Will on a piece of paper. Whether the Will is ‘legal’ will depend on what you write down and the Will might not be one which best suits your circumstances. Make sure that you have the necessary legal knowledge to draft the Will before starting. If what you write down doesn’t make sense legally, you can’t come back and correct it! Have you thought about substitute executors, age of vesting, survivorship clauses and the very important attestation clause? If the details of the above are not things you are highly familiar with, please don’t risk getting your Will wrong.

Your partner can only make their own Will, as it’s individual for one person. We would expect a couple to come to us to consider their Wills together as a family, and more often than not, a couple will want their Wills to be in “mirror form” which means that they do the same and reflect the other Will. So, if you want to determine what happens to what you own, then it’s important to have your own Will.

We recommend professional storage of your Will, so that if there is a fire at home or family members fall out in future years, your wishes are safely recorded in this valuable document, and preserved until the time when the Probate Registry will want to see what you said.

Yes. It would be very normal for your spouse to be an executor and also the main beneficiary of your Will, and this creates no problem at all.

A beneficiary can witness your Will, but they will then lose any benefit that you wanted to give them. This is not what you want. Most people do not deal with the witnessing of Wills very often, so it’s easier to let your professional Willwriter deal with the whole process. This deals with the issue of having independent witnesses who are not related to you or your beneficiaries, and also the other requirements relating to the witnessing, such as not allowing anyone to leave the room while the process takes place!

The main things that need to be dealt with in your Will, are the appointment of executors, guardians too if that’s relevant, and then of course what you want to give, and to who. We find that most people simply want to group together their whole estate, and give it to the same person or group of people. It is sensible to anticipate that people featuring in your Will may have died before you, and think through who you would wish to give your estate to if your first or second choices have already died at the time of your death.

Your Will generally remains valid, but some important exceptions apply. When you get married, unless you anticipated this in your Will, you will invalidate any Will you had before getting married. If your otherwise valid Will ends up with staple marks in it, or a mark that looks like a paperclip, or some other marks that make your Will look as though it might have had other papers attached to it, then your executors might have to deal with some pretty serious questioning when all they want to do is get hold of the Grant of Probate. This is a good reminder of how important good professional storage facilities are.

Details on the privacy policy for the website is here, as a client you also get access to details on how we manage your data when we meet.