Nov

29

Wills - Making Sense Of It

Posted In: Personal Finance

If you don’t have a valid will, you have no control over how your assets will be handled in the event of your death. Lots of people mean to make a will but never get around to it and it causes a great deal of inconvenience and even hardship to anyone you leave behind. There’s no mystery to the making of a will. There are some circumstances where it should be viewed as essential. If you have no relatives, for instance, then your worldly goods could go to the government in the end.

It may look confusing and it’s tempting to put it off. You’re thinking about making a will and you know there’s help at hand - maybe you’re thinking of approaching a professional firm of will-writers. If you’re worried that you’re not going to understand what they’re talking about, here are a few of the terms you don’t come across every day.

The first thing that will crop up is estate: This means the total value of everything you own. You need to add the value of any property, investments, bank accounts, personal possessions. Then you need to deduct anything you owe, such as mortgages or loans. The figure you’re left with is the value of your estate. Then there’s the word bequest: This simply means a particular object or amount of cash you’d like to leave to someone. A beneficiary is a person or organisation, such as a charity, which benefits by a gift from your estate. Executors are the people who you choose to name in your will to apply for probate to handle your estate. There can be up to four executors.

Probate is the legal document, which is given to the executor’s following your death. This document grants them the authority to handle your estate in accordance with your wishes. If you die intestate this means you’ve died without leaving a valid will. There are laws of intestacy which will apply to decide how your estate will be evaluated and distributed. This may be very different from what you’d envisaged or expected.

An administrator is the person who will ultimately deal with the estate of anyone who has not left a will. It should be said that an administrator will administer the estate strictly within the limits of the laws of intestacy. If you need to alter a will in any way - for instance a new grandchild arrives and you’d like to leave him or her a gift - then you can add a codicil which is a legal document and should be kept with the will. Your current will should not be altered in any way and the codicil will need to be signed and witnessed just as the original one was.

The term legacy just means a gift bequeathed in your will and usually refers to money. When the term residue is used it means what is left in your estate after the distribution of gifts has been completed, and all taxes, debts and fees due have been settled. Where a trust is mentioned, this refers to a legal arrangement which is put into place to hold something - property or money - in trust for another person. This is usually a child. Please don’t put it off any longer. The professionals are there to help and they’ll have answered all your queries many times before. Get it all sorted and you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing that your wishes will be carried out.

Making a Will is one of the most important things you will ever do, so it’s important that it’s done correctly! Why not go to the Brokers Online Wills page and find lots of information and articles on Wills, Last Will and Testaments, Free Wills and Wills and Trusts.

Article Source: Wills - Making Sense Of It