5 good reasons to write your own Will rather than see a lawyer

I need to preface this article by clarifying what I mean by writing your own Will. I do not mean sitting down with a blank piece of paper, and I do not mean using a blank form kit that you may buy from a bookstore. Either of these approaches is an absolutely terrible idea. No, I’m talking about using interactive software like the tools offered at LegalWills.ca, USLegalWills.com and LegalWills.co.uk. These services protect you from making the mistakes inherent within a blank form kit – like writing something in your Will that is not permitted by law, or not covering all possible situations. In fact, these services are now so good, that they are not just an option “if you cannot afford a lawyer”. They actually have some significant benefits over using a legal professional to prepare your Will.

You will actually get it done
Over 60% of adults don’t have a Will in place, and many complain that it’s the effort of booking an appointment with a lawyer that presents the most significant barrier. Many of our customers use LegalWills because they have procrastinated and they are leaving on a trip, or going into surgery and explain to us that they need “something” in place, and they’ll then get a “proper Will” written some time in the future. One of two things then happens; they either don’t ever get around to preparing the “proper one”, or alternatively, they eventually make an appointment with their lawyer, pay $600 and then find that their new Will is the same as the one prepared at LegalWills. When I say “the same”, I mean identical, word-for-word, exactly the same. The lawyer uses the same software that we use, so the two documents are indistinguishable from each other.

Future-proofing
Another significant barrier to preparing a Will is the notion that you would only write it once in your lifetime. After all, for $600 you’d expect it to be good for at least a few years. Unfortunately though, a Will lasts as long as there are no changes in the circumstance of anybody named in the Will. If your alternate Executor moves abroad, it’s probably a good idea to update your Will. Or supposing a charity comes into your life and you wish to recognize them in a bequest, you may want to update your Will. Unfortunately, with a lawyer it means booking another appointment and paying another $600 each time. With LegalWills you simply login, make the change and print out a new Will. It takes 10 minutes and costs nothing.

Educational
You may be the type of person who actually wants to learn about something as important as your Will. Unfortunately most lawyers do not have the time or inclination to step you through every clause in your Will and explain to you the implications of each sentence. Using a service like the one offered at LegalWills you are able to create your Will at your own pace and read as much or as little as you need to in order to educate yourself. Every page and every decision comes with accompanying help text so you will actually understand your Will and the decisions that were made to create your document. Most people who use our service actually feel empowered after preparing their own Will and completely understand the contents.

Private
There may be details to be included in your Will that you may not be willing to share. You may not feel comfortable telling a lawyer that you would like to leave your old school tie to your nephew and a long list of other personal memorabilia. There may be an organization that means a lot to you that you may not wish to share even with a lawyer. Using our service you get to choose exactly what is included in your Will and you needn’t discuss it with anybody if you don’t want to. You can make an update at any time without needing to explain to anybody the trigger for that update. It is truly your own private and personal document.

Affordable
With all of these advantages you’d almost think that the services at LegalWills would be at least as expensive as going to see a lawyer. But ultimately you are preparing your own documents, and you are not receiving legal advice from us. In North America you can prepare your Will at LegalWills.ca and USLegalWills.com for $34.95, at LegalWills.co.uk it costs £24.95.

Preparing your own document using our services is not an option for people who “can’t afford” legal fees. It is an educated choice for people who need to prepare a Will, who want to make updates whenever they need to, who want to learn a little more about the process, and who protect their privacy. Yes, it’s more affordable, and yes, the final document is identical, but there is so much more that comes with a service like ours.

“How come your Wills are so cheap?”

This is one of the most common questions we are asked; “how is it that if I go to a professional Will writer – a solicitor or lawyer, they will charge me 20 times your price?”. How do we make your service so affordable? 

I think the most important factor is our sense of value for money. All too often we see lawyers writing online about a professional estate plan costing “as little as $1,200″. Even the most conservative estimates are in the range of “only $400-600″. To us, that seems like an outrageous amount of money. We’ve seen articles, written by lawyers saying “If you’re using a will kit because you’re too cheap to pay for legal advice”, which I think really demonstrates the disconnect between those paying for the service and those offering the service. It’s not a matter of being too cheap, it’s a matter of simply not being able to afford it.

This is why the Chief Justice of Canada, the Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin noted, while addressing a room full of law students;

“the justice system…has failed thousands of Canadians who don’t have a legal will, simply because they do not have the money to hire a lawyer to draft one or are so afraid that what it will cost will bankrupt them”

We think it’s a disgrace that nearly three quarters of adults in the UK, US and Canada do not have a legal Will. This number should not be 70%, it should be nearer to 5%. It doesn’t make sense that a relatively simple document should be the exclusively the purview of legal professionals. Occasionally, a complex estate plan does require legal advice that draws upon the years of training and experience of a legal professional, but the legal profession know that no legal knowledge is required in the drafting of the vast majority of Wills. But this won’t stop them from scaremongering and sharing examples of how it can all go wrong. Take this example;

Many people unfortunately believe they can create their own will based on a legal (service) they located on the Web. These individuals need to realize that their estate probably does not simply consist of a bank account and a home. Many estates today could easily include additional real property (real estate), jewelry, a baseball card collection, first edition Nancy Drew books…

What on earth is this saying? how does a Will written by a legal professional for $600 cover these items any more thoroughly that an online service. In fact, we would argue that if you are including these items in your Will you SHOULD use an online service – it allows you to update your Will free of charge every time a change is made to your inventory. Otherwise you’ll be returning to the lawyer each time you buy a new first edition Nancy Drew book – the cost of an update – $500.

Writing the Will yourself can also protect you against immoral thieves like this woman.

The former solicitor and District Court judge, Heather Perrin, received her second jail sentence for deceiving her clients. Having been found guilty in November of tricking her elderly friend, Thomas Davis, into bequeathing half of his €1m estate to her two adult children, she pleaded guilty to falsifying another client’s account, for her own gain

Our services at LegalWills.ca, USLegalWills.com and LegalWills.co.uk allow you to write your own Will, from home, and guides you through the process. You learn about the contents of your Will, and the things to consider. You can update it at any time, and it will cost you $34.95 in the US or Canada, or £24.95 in the UK.

If it was up to us, the government would offer our website as a public service to ensure that everybody had a Will in place. In the meantime, we cover our costs and hope that we can make the process accessible to as many people as we can.

Bleak House and your Last Will and Testament

I was recently reminded of the Charles Dickens novel Bleak House, which centres around the court case Jarndyce and Jarndyce. For those of you unfamiliar with the story; it tells of a legal battle over a large inheritance which is dragged on through the court system. In fact, it continues for generations until the case is finally closed.

as well as he could make out, it was over. Over for the day? we asked him. No, he said, over for good. Over for good! When we heard this unaccountable answer, we looked at one another quite lost in amazement. Could it be possible that the will had set things right at last and that Richard and Ada were going to be rich? It seemed too good to be true. Alas it was! ……”Mr. Kenge,” said Allan, appearing enlightened all in a moment. “Excuse me, our time presses. Do I understand that the whole estate is found to have been absorbed in costs?” “Hem! I believe so,”

The lawyers continued to fight the battle over the inheritance until the whole estate was absorbed in legal fees, at which time, the lawyers all stopped working on the case !! 

The novel was written in 1853, in a very different World to the one we live in, but just yesterday I saw that, generations on, the legal profession still works in the same way. The bankruptcy of Nortel has so far racked up $755M in legal fees while the parties argue on how to divide $9B in assets, and after nearly a billion dollars in legal expenses, the proceedings are no closer to a resolution. The lawyers have no vested interest in drawing the case to a close as they can continue to bill $1000 an hour in fees.

So what does this mean for your estate? and how can you minimize your assets ending up in the hands of litigating lawyers?

• Write your Will, make it clear and unambiguous.
• Do not use a blank do-it-yourself form from a bookstore
• Sign it according to the signing requirements in your jurisdiction (usually two witnesses must sign, who have no vested interest in the contents of the Will).
• Write your Will while you are young enough to have the capacity to understand it.
• Update your Will as soon as your personal or financial circumstances change.
• Never make an update to a Will by writing on the document or putting lines through sections. Always prepare a new Will when you want to make a change.
• If you have very complicated affairs, consider getting legal advice when preparing a Will.

It is a myth that preparing your own Will means that your estate is more likely to face a legal challenge. If you use an interactive online service like the ones offered at LegalWills.ca, USLegalWills.com and LegalWills.co.uk you can create a Will as complete and legal as a Will prepared by a lawyer or solicitor. In fact, if you look at the legal fights over Wills, they are frequently prepared by lawyers and we’ve discussed many in this blog, for example Huguette M. Clark, and Anna Nicole Smith. Often though, problems arise from Wills not being updated properly because circumstances change, and a return to a lawyer’s office is too expensive or inconvenient. This is why many people are turning to online services like those offered by LegalWills because it allows them to prepare the document conveniently, but more importantly, these services allow the users to update their document at any time, as often as they wish. In many ways, the services reduce the likelihood of a legal challenge, and the loss of the entire estate to legal fees.

My Life Locker

I read a great article last week entitled “10 minute guide to estate planning“. The article starts by framing the problem; everybody knows that they should have their estate planning in place, but only 44% had done anything about it, but then the article strips away the complexities and conveys three simple messages; Get life insurance, prepare your estate planning documents, and then “Create a Master Document for Your Loved Ones”. We’ve discussed at length the creation of the estate planning documents in previous articles, and a Will, Power of Attorney and Living Will can be created easily and inexpensively at www.legalwills.ca, www.uslegalwills.com and www.legalwills.co.uk, but it was the reference to a master document for your loved ones that I found really interesting.

The article describes the master document as

An important aspect of estate planning involves sitting down and listing all of your assets and debts. Next to these items, state everything you want done to close them out and to put the assets in the hands of the people who you wish to have them… This document can be a tremendous help to your grieving family who may end up disagreeing about who gets what, when and how.

It makes complete sense to do this, but very few people do because it’s actually more difficult than it seems. However, recently I was fortunate to meet Sandra Tisiot, the creator of My Life Locker. I think Sandra may be the best person to introduce My Life Locker to you….

My Life Locker is perfect solution for organization everything important in one place all organized into “lockers”. The first locker prompts you to list your family contact information, the second covers important information like property details. You then go on to list financial information in locker three, and finally locker four has space for your professional contacts. If your Executor located your Will, and then saw your Life Locker sitting next to it, they would breath a sigh of relief. In a recent article we talked about the billions of dollars and pounds sitting in bank accounts of deceased individuals, that is never claimed simply because nobody knew it was there. My Life Locker solves this problem.

I recently had to cover a friend’s business interests while he went on vacation in Europe for a couple of weeks and we spent hours going through all of his contacts, procedures for dealing with things and explaining everything that he has to do to keep his business ticking over. It will be a little bit like that for your Executor trying to administer your estate, except they are usually given no information whatsoever. My Life Locker is a great solution for solving an age old problem for the Executor, by simply giving them the information that they need.

Why your next Will probably won’t be your Last Will

It is a mystery why most adults do not prepare their Will. We all know it is an essential document; it describes how the estate should be distributed, it makes somebody responsible to carrying out the directions (the Executor), it may name guardians for children, and set up trusts for minor children. Most importantly it avoids a significant headache for the family and loved ones left behind. But depending on which statistics you believe, anything from 60-80 percent of adults don’t have a Will, and of equal concern is that most people with a Will don’t continually review it to make sure that it is up to date.

We have many discussions with people contemplating preparing their Will and one misguided belief undermines the whole process. Many people have the notion that they only get one shot at preparing a Will. The document that they prepare will be their Last Will and Testament, the actual document that will be read in the days following their departure. If this is the case, then most people want to hold out until they know for sure that this document will be the one that reflects a life time of experiences and encounters. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve been asked variations of “I am expecting a child next April, should I hold off on creating my Will until then”. The answer is that, of course you are going to need to update the Will when the child is born, but nobody should live a single day without a current Will representing their situation on that given day. Write a Will today, and update it next April.

So why are people so reluctant to do this? because it is inconvenient and expensive to write a Will with a lawyer and then have to update it every time a circumstance changes. We’ve heard horror stories of lawyers charging $100 or £100 per edit to a Will, and simple updates costing as much as 400 to 600 dollars or pounds. No wonder people want to make sure that they only have to do this once in their life.

This is why more people are turning to online services like LegalWills.ca, USLegalWills.com and LegalWills.co.uk where a Will can not only be prepared much more affordably, but the documents can also be updated in minutes, at home. A Will can be updated dozens of times a year if need be, at no additional cost. Using a service like this ensures that not only do you have a legal Will, it will always reflect your life at that moment.

The difficulties facing an estate administrator

We have written posts in the past about the importance of choosing the right person as Executor of your estate, and discussed the responsibilities that come with this position. There are two specific challenges that face an estate administrator that are constantly brought to our attention at LegalWills.

The first is locating the Will. Almost every day we receive an email from somebody who is looking for a person’s Will. Somebody has died, they told everybody that they have a Will, but nobody can find it. We have discussed this previously and the most important piece of advice is to let your Executor know where your Will is stored. Where you store the document is a personal preference and there are pros and cons to every decision, but if your Executor doesn’t know where it is, there is little chance of your wishes ever being respected.

Once the Executor has found the Will, they are then granted the powers from the courts to administer the estate and this is where the work really starts. The Executor has to gather up all of the assets in the estate – but how will they know where all of the assets are held? Often a Will simply states that “my entire estate is to be shared in the following way; one third to person A, one third to person B….etc” How does the Executor know where to find every bank account, every insurance policy, every investment, every stock portfolio, or even that bundle under the floorboards! How does the Executor even know when everything has been identified.

The scope of this issue was brought into focus last week when Citibank created a 16 page supplement in the New York Daily News. The title read “The following persons appear from our records to be entitled to unclaimed property consisting of cash amounts of fifty dollars or more…”. I haven’t counted, but there appear to be thousands of names including the philanthropist and socialite Brooke Astor who died in 2007.

A significant proportion of these thousands of abandoned accounts should have been part of an estate, but the estate administrator had no idea that they existed. This list is for Citibank in New York, and it is reasonable to assume that every bank in every country has a similar list. This amounts to billions of dollars, pounds and euros held by banks, unbeknownst to the estate executors.

Of course, it doesn’t make sense to list every account in one’s Will; it would mean updating your Will every time a bank account was changed, or a stock portfolio was cashed out. At LegalWills.ca, USLegalWills.com and LegalWills.co.uk we encourage everybody to complete a form that allows them to itemize their personal assets as well as list important people to contact. This document does not have the same legal standing and does not need to be signed and witnessed; it can be updated any time an asset changes. It can then be stored with the Will so that the Executor has a complete inventory of assets at the appropriate time.

In our digital age of PayPal accounts, domain name purchases, online gambling accounts, blog revenues and other digital assets, it is more important than ever to communicate to your Executor exactly where your assets are held. Many people do not even know the true extent of their spouse’s accounts, and without a list stored with the Will, an Executor would never even know that they had missed an important or valuable asset.

Understanding Digital Death: Steps to Protect Yourself Online (Guest Post)

The following is a guest post from Will Eve of finder.com.au

There’s a growing awareness about the downside of living a life so intertwined with computers. First there was the the personal computer, an instrument that made work easier for so many occupations, but we did get up and walk away from it when our work was done. Even if we went back and used it again for recreational purposes most of us recognised the difference between reality and what our computers offered. The advent of the laptop brought us much closer to the digital age. We were now able to take our computers with us when we went outside of the office or home. The smaller note book made it easier again.

Our Physical Lives Are Now a Part of our Digital Lives

More recently we’ve seen a phenomenal increase in the use of the smartphone, which after all is really just a computer that you can hold in the palm of your hand. Then we were introduced to the iPad and tablet. All this development means our lives are becoming more and more involved with the digital world. All you need do is watch a crowd of people walking along a thoroughfare, relaxing in a park or attending a sporting event. A large proportion of them will have a mobile phone up to their ear. People travelling on trains and buses are commonly seen totally engaged with their laptops or smartphones. This has resulted in the following:

• Online games and social interactions. The completion of a crossword puzzle in the daily newspaper or magazine has been replaced by people interacting with others anywhere in the world by playing scrabble and other like games on their computers. Social media has become the ‘in’ thing in all nations around the globe. Facebook and Twitter have untold millions of subscribers. We now do our banking online, we purchase items online, we sell things online, we get the latest local, national and world news online. In fact anything we don’t know we go online to get the answer. It all results in the fact that our whole live have been taken over and we now have a digital life that runs parallel to our physical lives.
• What happens when we die? What happens to our digital life? The short answer is, nothing. It continues on as normal. We’re told that Facebook alone contains more than five million accounts belonging to people who have passed on. The mind only boggles at the number of other account throughout the world that remain active despite the persons, whose names they are in, being no longer with us.
• The digital after life. Some people are referring to our online death after our physical death as being a digital afterlife and something that has to be attended to. Because so much of our private business is carried out online these days we all have to look at putting in place some sort of digital estate plan that will attend to these online accounts on our behalf when we can no longer do so ourselves. Some of the bigger search engines and social media sites are making attempts to help those left behind. Yahoo for instance will terminate an account on receipt of a death certificate. Twitter will archive all the tweets of a deceased account holder and pass them on to an appropriate survivor. However, there is a long way to go before the problem is solved completely.
• One of the biggest problems is the necessity of having to protect our online IDs with user-names and passwords. Once you die your online ID lives on and will continue to do so if nobody can enter the program to close it down. This means all the family and holiday photos you have stored can no longer be accessed, Your emails accounts will continue. Even your PayPal account where you can have a lot of money stored that should rightfully go to your loved ones will remain on your PayPal account, theoretically forever.
• You can make it much easier for your agent, or executor of your will, to get things sorted out for your loved ones benefit if you make an inventory of all the programs you have online. If you list every account you have, explain what it’s for and what you want done with it along with the relevant user-name and password, your agent, or executor, will then be able to enter the account and treat it as though it was either his or hers.
• This brings up another question, that of the security of all this information. You won’t want all your online banking and other sensitive personal details kept where others can get access to it. You could save it all to a disk or flash drive and have it stored with your life insurance and disability policies. You could entrust it to a person whom you trust 100 percent but this would make it hard for you to change the passwords on a regular basis and if you were to die after you had changed the passwords but had not got around to altering the records on the disk or flash drive all your good intentions will have been for nothing.
• To get over this problem there are a number of sites online that are dedicated to keeping passwords safe. These sites keep all your passwords and other vital information in storage where you can still access them at any time to change the details. Nobody else can gain entry to the site other than through a unique password. In this way all you need do is to have this password kept for your agent or executor and he or she can then go about what they have to do.

This article is from Will from Life Insurance Finder. Learn more about the fascinating world of Digital Death and Digital Estate planing with the What Happens Online When You Die and Experts Guide to Protect Yourself Online infographics.