Have you got a will in place? Any advice?

[BramleyMoore]

Married with two teen kids and really need to make a joint will as we currently have nothing in place.
Did you get specialist legal advice, and is your will simple or more complex?
We have a mortgaged house with modest savings, so a pretty ordinary situation.
I'm finding it a bit daunting to be honest, but I need to pull my finger out and get it done!

I’ve just done mine for free through the lullaby trust as I wanted to leave them money in my will anyway. I left 49% of everything to each son and 2% to the lullaby trust. It was very simple. A copy is stored and I got an email copy which I have sent to my sons and my sister.
I also wrote my wishes in there eg I basically want to be cremated and my ashes scattered with my son who died many years ago. I also wrote I want the cheapest funeral possible as I want my sons to benefit from the money rather than it be spent on flowers etc. Just personal preferences of mine. They can choose to ignore the “wishes section” if they want but I am pretty confident they will put mine and my sons ashes together.

There was a poster here, Mumblechum I think her name was, who used to offer a will service (sometimes with discounts). We did ours (ordinary, mirror wills) with her. She was good!

Here is her website.

Making a will, inheritance tax, power of attorney https://share.google/C9aMkR0icx4X65qZl

We had a few phone calls then she sent us a draft, which we then added corrections to. Happy with the finished product.

Does your workplace or union (if any) have any kind of benefits package? I got my will done for free that way.

Ours is more complicated due to DHs kids from previous relationship. But yours sounds relatively easy and you could use one of the charities that does cheap wills for a donation. https://www.macmillan.org.uk/donate/gifts-in-wills/free-will-service/choose-your-location

but ours was relatively cheap, £200 to £300 from memory at local solicitors.having a will speeds things up if one of you dies and makes it much easier for whoever is left behind.

We did ours via my union membership who offer a free mirror will writing service for members and their spouses.
We included our funeral wishes and provision for caring for our children in the case of us neither being around.

A sensible thing to do! I did mine in my 40s and have updated it 3 times due to divorce and death. Its a complicated one due to remarrying as I dont want anything going to his adult children. My direct cremation wishes are there too so no one has to worry about what I would have wanted.
Dont forget LPAS either.

Before kids, we did it ourselves via Which. Once we had a child (and knowledge of a complex illness) we updated/revised it at a local solicitors. We went down the solicitors route as we wanted to leave at 10% of our assets to a particular charity (but did not want to make our will through them) and have other potentially non standard clauses regarding care for our child when we die. It wasnt expensive, a couple of hundred maybe?

We would have donated to the particular charity anyway, but donations of 10% or above are tax efficient as your whole estate will be Inheritance Taxed at a lower amount (36% v 40%) ... If you live in London/the SE then it is likely that your property (assuming you have paid off the mortage by then) will be higher than the limits, without factoring in other assets. I believe it is technically donations during your lifetime but it is simpler all round if you just do it as 10% or above in a will.

We did ours through Union membership. Straightforward in that everything goes to our dc but we named executors, people to manage finances if the DC are still underage, plus our wishes for funerals.

Really simple- everything to each other, and if we're both dead to the kids in equal shares. I keep wondering whether we ought to do something a bit more complex and think about things like one of us potentially remarrying but I can't face it at the moment.

Thank you! I hadn't thought about my union membership so will explore that option, plus the charity donation route. Thanks all very helpful! 💐

the difficulty of a charity getting a percentage of your estate is that then they have a duty to question the disposal of every single asset and this can be very troublesome for the executors.

leaving a fixed sum is much easier for the executors to manage

if you do want to leave money to charity in an inheritance tax efficient way then yes you want to make the figure at least 10% of the amount you will pay tax on (not 10% of the entire estate)

if you pick a figure and undershoot the 10% then the beneficiaries can top it up by way of a variation.

It can be worth using a solicitor for factors you maybe hadn’t thought of.

E.g. a childless aunt left everything to be divided between 11 nieces and nephews. But the will added that if any of them predeceased her, their share was to go to their children ‘whether natural or adopted, legitimate or illegitimate.’
I was 100% sure that was down to a solicitor, to avoid any possible arguments.

And a friend of,ours wanted to leave a house he owned to a particular charity. (Apparently it’s not uncommon.). The solicitor told him to leave the actual house, not the proceeds of the sale, ‘otherwise you’ll have endless hassle from them, why hasn’t it sold yet, why didn’t it sell for more money’ etc.

In fact there was still hassle from them! A letter to say, ‘Actually it’d be easier for us if you could just sell it yourself and give us the money.’
The bloody cheek of it!

We have very simple wills that we did after DD1 was born. Basically just mirroring each other and saying everything gets left to the surviving partner, or if we both die it is split between our children equally.

We also had a clause in there naming guardians and "back up" guardians for our children if something happened to DH and I while they are still young. We discussed that with the people we were naming as guardians and emailed them the details.

We used a local will writer. Not a solicitor although I believe she worked at a legal firm but did will writing on the side. She was excellent and not at all expensive, about £75 from memory.

Are you in a union at work op? They will often do them for free.

An aunt left some fixed sums to some people and as the years had gone by, those amounts weren't what they would have sounded like when the will was first made. So I used percentages in my will.
e.g. £6000 now might not have the same value in ten years.

Interesting, that sentence about the children. Nothing very close to me, but I did know of a case where one person thought a grown-up child shouldn't inherit. I quietly thought that perhaps the maker of the will knew exactly what he was doing, and certainly intended it.

If you go down the DIY/ free charity will route, make sure the will is bound or stapled. I have just had to wait months for probate to go through because the will wasn't bound or stapled. Crazy but true!

Yes you should get it done along with LPAs - they are almost more important than your wills. Dont put it off any longer!

Be careful with charity donations, they are relentless in pursuing their share from your grieving relatives. It may be better to leave a non legally binding letter of wishes asking your executor to donate a sum rather than enshrine it in your will. Charities have been known to force house sales or take executors to court

We went through a solicitor rather than doing it ourselves and I'm glad we did. Ours looked fairly straightforward at first (married, house, children), but they asked questions we hadn't even considered around guardians, substitute beneficiaries and what would happen if one of us remarried in the future.

I think a lot of people assume their situation is "simple" until someone talks them through the different scenarios. We used mlplaw and they explained everything in plain English rather than making it feel intimidating. It gave us much more confidence that we'd covered everything properly.

I'd definitely recommend getting LPAs sorted at the same time as well, as several people have mentioned.

If Mumblechum isn’t a solicitor I’d take great care….id recommend always using a solicitors practice.

If you have simple affairs, then just get a simple will done right now. You can leave letters of wishes alongside (not binding, but usually adhered to by convention - and also can be updated at your whim without needing formal codicils or redrawing etc).

At least then you have something that will meet most of your wishes if you end up under a bus tomorrow. You can think harder about finer details or small changes you want to make and come back to it in future.

Just get a basic Will done rightaway. I have seen the awfulness of intestate first hand and you wouldn't wish it on an enemy let alone a grieving loved one.

ALSO: LPAs x 2 for each of you! You can do 95% online then just get them printed for hard copy signing.

I would echo this advice. The solicitor we used raised several points we had never considered. Cost a bit more but worth it in my opinion

We used the Which will writing service. Very easy and straightforward. Our dcs are adults so we didn't need to worry about guardians. We have mirror wills leaving everything to the surviving spouse and then equal shares to our children. The online service guides you through the process and makes sure you are aware of any potential issues. One of our dcs has children and the guide gave us the option to leave their share to their children if our DC dies before us. We were also able to appoint an alternative executor in case either of our dcs cannot do it when the time comes. The will was checked and they came back with a couple of points for us to think about. Once we were happy, the will was printed and bound before being sent to us to sign and have witnessed. We also have a code to register it with the national wills service, included in the cost. We were very happy with the service.

I don’t know why you would recommend a solicitor over a professional will writing service @Gall10

we have been very impressed with @mumblechum’sservice

https://www.marlowwills.co.uk/