Published on: 31st December 2018

IT HAS HAPPENED AGAIN

Your Will tells everyone what should happen to your money, possessions and property after you die - all of these assets are collectively known as your estate. If you do not leave a Will, the law decides how your estate is passed on, which may not be in line with your wishes.

Regardless of your age or health it is important to plan ahead, particularly if you own a property or have savings, investments, insurance policies or you own a business. There are also numerous benefits to having a Will, from ensuring you leave an inheritance to family and friends to potentially reducing the amount of Inheritance Tax that may be payable on your estate.

We all take care of things that we treasure so it makes perfect sense to store your Will in a secure and safe location as well. Your Will is vitally important in enabling you to leave clear instructions on how your estate is to be distributed. If anything happens to your Will or if your Executor doesn't know where to find it, you may as well not have written one. The original Will is the only document that will be legally accepted and it should be in pristine condition to ensure that there are no complications when following the wishes set out in it. It is vital that your documents are stored appropriately so that it meets the specific requirements of the Probate Court when it is presented by your Executor(s). Many people will understandably assume that the safest place to store their Will is within their house, but research shows that the majority of family members (67%) wouldn't know where their relative's Will is stored at home. There are further risks associated with "self-storage" such as a house fire or losing the Will during a "tidy up" or house move. We have always offered our clients the options of "self-storage" or professional storage in our fire resistant safes. Unfortunately, we have had another distressing example of a client, who selected "self-storage" losing their Will. They passed away at the beginning of December and the family cannot find the Will. Our client's estate will be distributed according to the rules of intestacy which were created by the Government. Often the rules do not give a result that the deceased would have wanted and that is the situation in this case.

This incident has caused us to review our services and with effect from 01 January 2019 our default option will be to offer professional storage whilst giving clients the option to "opt out" of this service. As part of our professional storage offering we will scan the Will before it goes into storage and we will email the scanned copy to our client.

If you would like to meet with one of our Consultants to discuss any of the issues raised in this article or any other Estate Planning topic please telephone 01732 868190 or click here. Don't delay ~ Act today!

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