Making a Will

A Will may be one of the most important legal documents you sign in your lifetime. If you have not made a Will, we strongly advise that you do. This will help prevent problems for your family and friends after your death and allows you to ensure your assets pass in accordance with your wishes.

By taking the time to get to know you and your particular personal and financial circumstances, we can create a Will tailored to your needs, making provision for the most important people in your life.

In simple terms, a Will can:

• appoint Executors and Trustees who you trust to administer your estate on your death and to manage any assets which are to be held in trust e.g. for children;
• ensure your assets are given to those you wish to receive them. If no Will is in place then the Rules of Intestacy will dictate who would inherit your assets;
• ensure unmarried partners and partners who have not registered a civil partnership inherit from each other;
• appoint guardians for young children if either one or both parents die;
• express your funeral wishes;
• say who will benefit if your primary beneficiary dies before you;
• exclude as well as include family, friends, charities and dependents.

A Will can also amongst other things:

• be used to moderate Inheritance Tax otherwise due to be paid from your estate;
• potentially preserve assets from the payment of care fees especially when one partner dies and the survivor ends up in care;
• in second marriages/civil partnerships and generally, give to a surviving spouse/civil partner or cohabitee the right to continue to live in a property you own, whilst ensuring that the property is inherited by your family and not theirs;
• gift business assets and agricultural land and property;
• be used to ensure that your beneficiaries are treated equally, especially if in your lifetime you have given money to one beneficiary by leaving extra to the other beneficiaries named in the Will so that they are overall treated equally;
• create trusts to protect young or vulnerable beneficiaries.

We can also advise on:

• Living Wills, also called Advanced Directives;
• Statutory Wills - the making of a Will with the authority of the Court of Protection for someone lacking testamentary capacity;
• Deeds of Variation - rewriting someone’s Will after they have died to alter how assets are inherited.

We can store your Will free of charge in our secure and fireproof storage facility, and our costs include the registration of your Will with ‘Certainty’, a Law Society approved National Will Register service, so it can be easily located when the time comes.

We can also offer home or hospital visits if required and where possible can facilitate seeing people at very short notice if an urgent Will is needed.

Click here to download our Will Questionnaire.