Month: September 2014

10 terms you will learn when you write your Will

When you prepare a Will using our service, the final document will include many legal terms and unfamiliar language that we do not tend to use in our daily lives. There will be expressions like “testamentary dispositions” and you won’t find a layman’s word like “everything” instead the Will is going to refer to “all my estate, both real and personal whatsoever and wheresoever” which for most people would amount to the same thing.

Last Will and Testament

There are however 10 terms that there is no avoiding when preparing a well-drafted Will, and it is important to fully understand what they mean. They usually appear in this order in the Will;

Testator

This is simply the person Continue reading →

Intestate Succession

What happens if you die without a Last Will and Testament?

I don’t need a Will. It is obvious who will get my things anyway. Everything will go to my spouse.

We hear this a lot, and nothing could be further from the truth. The distribution of an estate without a Will (intestate law) is so complicated that the government websites have a question and answer wizard to step you through a number of different family situations. At the end of this they calculate the shares of the estate going to each person. So let us dispel a few myths.

Myth 1: If I die without a Last Will and Testament my spouse will receive everything.

Fact: This is actually true for the first £250k in value. But according to an article published this week in the Guardian, the average house price in England is £272k, with the average price in London now at £514k. The £250k threshold is no longer limited to the interests of the very wealthy. Everything above £250k is divided such that any children will take half, and the spouse will take a “life interest” in half, meaning that the children will receive that second half when the surviving parent dies. Continue reading →

New home for our blog

We have been offering our online legal Will service since 2003, and have been blogging about estate planning issues for the last 4 years at legalwills.wordpress.com.

There are well over 100 articles on our old blog, and we are starting afresh with a new blog embedded directly on our website. We are hoping that soon we will have another 100 articles that will inform, education and entertain you.