To suggest all couples, especially those with children

[gk6277]

Should make sure they each have life insurance, and ideally a will, as I am worried some of the people dying from coronavirus could be leaving behind a financial nightmare for their loved ones.

I thought being married meant your partner and child got your assets! My financial advisor or solicitor (can't remember which) said it'll be a waste of my money making a will for this reason.

That advice doesn't protect the children's assets if the surviving spouse remarried later on. If you remarry, your 2nd spouse will inherit everything you inherited from your late spouse as that forms part of your estate in a standard mirror will. If you want your children to inherit after your or dh's death to prevent it going to a new spouse, then get a life interest will done.

To protect our children, we bought our house as tenants in common rather than jointly & have life interest wills. This allows you to leave your share of the property to a named person. So your spouse doesn't automatically inherit unless they're named in your will. There is a life interest clause allowing us to live in the property for the duration of our lifetime after the death of one spouse.

life interest wills

guidance for making wills in the UK

I’m not actually sure it is possible to make a will at the mo- you’d have to travel to get the two witnesses required and this is surely non essential. My husband and I considered doing it but decided that we couldn’t do it legally!!

I'm glad now that we did our wills about 3 years ago. We already had life insurance to cover the mortgage.

I'd be rather on edge at the moment if we had not done this.

@aupresdemonarbre I've just had my first draft of my will through the post. The solicitor called me to discuss our requirements. She then followed it up via email and I emailed her our verification docs. We will go through the draft & then pop into the office to sign, the witnesses will be the receptionists.

@ineedabreak19 that sounds totally fine to me, as in low risk, but I do think it’s technically illegally (ie making a will is not one of the reasonable excuses for travel outside the home under the regulations) and personally I’m a lawyer so I’m not supposed to break the law (professional ethical obligations) so I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing this.

*technically illegal

You could put the will in a clipboard and sign it while the neighbour watches through the window. Then put the clipboard on the car bonnet and go in. They come out and sign it while you look through the window. Go and get it. Everyone then washes hands.

Fair enough, you need to do what is comfortable for you. My solicitor did give me the option of sending the wills & I ask two neighbours to witness.

I decided to do this ASAP as I have an underlying health condition which is fine now but could be complicated by COVID-19. Plus, my dc have SEND so I wanted to ensure that they were protected too.

Yes I’m definitely not criticising you, and personally I feel the law is too strict in any event (for precisely the reason that stuff like what you describe should be allowed). It’s just that I feel obliged to follow it. For others, getting neighbours to sign could work, if you know them.

Hopefully once the lockdown is lifted you can get your will drawn up. Quite right that you have to abide by your industry regulations.

In my head I've squared it as an essential necessity even though it technically isn't!

Thanks for all the info everyone, its something that needs sorting out then (a will) . Maybe I was told information that was relevant BEFORE we were married and had our son. We do have great life insurance, basically if one of us dies the house gets paid off and the other parent gets a lump sum to being our son up with, which goes up with inflation every year, I think it's in the region of £100'000 maybe more. We pay a fair whack for it but it's worth it.

I’ve been doing my (fairly complicated) Will via Zoom with a local lawyer. He says his practice is overrun with people like me! I’m middle-aged I suppose, but my dad died with a decent Will in place and it still took 7 years to sort out his estate. I’m not leaving that nightmare to my family.

By the way, let’s please not assume everyone on this thread is operating under UK inheritance law, hey? The OP’s post is very relevant wherever in the world you’re reading from.

I’d also add, it’s worth having some cash stashed somewhere that doesn’t require the whole legal process to be finished before it’s accessed (which can take years). If you want to leave funeral/interment/cremation instructions, then leave the money to satisfy those arrangements. Or make sure you've picked a life-insurance company that pays out fast and easily (for funeral stuff).

Thanks for the thread, OP. I actually think being organised in this way is a very positive, life-affirming thing to do!

@nitpickpicknick, absolutely, I've never been busier.

A lot of my clients for some reason are NHS frontline workers, and I'm typically turning their wills round within 36 hours of Zoom calls. What's very heartening to me is that when I explain to other clients that the usual turnaround of 3 days will now be 4 or 5 as a result, every single one of them has been very understanding and happy to let an NHS/vulnerable client skip the queue ahead of them.

I think Covid has brought out the best in many people in some ways.

People are also coming up with nifty ways of getting their wills witnessed whilst still complying with the requirements of the Wills Act 1837

Also write down what you would like at your funeral. Makes life so much easier for those left behind.

If youre the person who deals with financial admin please write a list of providers and account numbers. Also list your bank accounts.

making a will is not one of the reasonable excuses for travel outside the home under the regulations

There are a number of things like that at this time, and I know you can't legislate for everything - but it does depend on circumstances as to whether the exact same task is something that can easily wait or turns out to be rather more urgent than that.

Making a will because you've never got around to it and now have some more spare time to tick off your to-do list is not an essential activity or reasonable excuse, but what if you're suddenly very ill and rapidly reach the stage where the doctors gently advise you to 'make sure everything is in order'? Also, statistically, there will be previously healthy people who do die (whether from covid or something else such as an accident) without a will, for whom having made one 'because I always meant to get it done and just ticked off the list' would have been a very useful thing, but impossible because of the lockdown.

There will also be medical check-ups that are currently on hold because 'it's only a routine check-up - hardly an emergency' - but sometimes, a check-up can directly flag up a serious issue that needs to be treated urgently. Whilst they're obviously the first medical thing to shelve in a time such as this, there's no guaranteed way of knowing which are the 99,999 people having routine check-ups who will be told 'all fine' or recommended to consider a couple of little lifestyle tweaks and which is the one person who will be rushed straight to theatre.

Also write down what you would like at your funeral. Makes life so much easier for those left behind.

Now that is a very worthwhile suggestion. So many people avoid talking about it, becaise they don't like to think about it or believe that it's 'tempting fate'.

You have to rationalise that it WILL happen and understand that it's actually a good thing to talk about. Talking about it won't change the day when you die, it just means that, when your time does come, if honoured by your family and if possible/allowable, you'll get the funeral and other post-death arrangements that you wanted rather than leaving people to guess and invariably NOT doing exactly what you would have wanted.

I have put down my funeral wishes and appointed guardians for my children as well as a secondary executor. My solicitor has done my will so that my children are protected. My dh is an adult and can care for himself and can remarry if he wants. However, my concern is that my kids don't lose their inheritance to another person & their kids. You can't future proof for everything but it's important to do as much as you can to protect your children's inheritance.

My neighbour died and everything that she inherited from her late 2nd husband went to her children from her 1st marriage and not her step children. Her 2nd husband had a standard will so my neighbour inherited everything including her late husband's inheritance from his parents & 1st wife. My neighbour died leaving a standard will naming her children as her heirs not her step children. The step children missed out on receiving their portion of inheritances from their mum & paternal c grandparents because their dad didn't name them in his will. I want to avoid a situation like this if at all possible.

Yes, my mum wrote down what hymns and prayers she wanted and other details. It made it so much easier to organise her funeral.
She didn't do this is her will actually but in a separate letter.

One of the best bits of advice I was given (by a financial adviser when I started work at a bank a lifetime ago) was that after life and critical illness insurance, and making a will, was to try and get 3 months' worth of income saved up for a rainy day. So enough to cover 3 months bills and living should the worst happen. There have been times since that I've struggled to withdraw the last few quid off my overdraft but gradually I've been saving bits and pieces. Not there yet but I could stretch things without panicking for a while.

I second listing all your financial/service providers with most recent policy numbers. File paperwork sensibly so that those left to deal with your affairs can sit with a folder/list and ring round all in one go rather than discovering info from scraps of paper months later bitter experience

Making a will is even more important if you are a mixed family so that respective children don't lose out. Off subject slightly, my whole immediate family (8 of us) had a sooper dooper once-in-a-lifetime holiday to the USA couple of years back. It wasn't until I was arranging specialist insurance for a balloon ride in Sedona that I realised if the balloon crashed or either plane went down, then my will wouldn't have been worth the paper it was written on!! Call me panic pants but I hurriedly arranged a codicil (to apply for that 3 weeks only) where if disaster struck and we were all gonners then my estate would go to a very dear friend of mine. Anyway, we all survived and the codicil was removed!

Thank you for this. It made me check my emails, I’m with a union and they are offering a free will for me and a mirror will for DH for £35