charities

Many people find it difficult to make charitable donations during their lifetime, but you can leave charitable bequests in your Will. This is “planned giving” and is a very effective way of making a generous charitable donation without a significant financial impact on you or your family. A charitable bequest can be a specific item like a car, a fixed sum of money, or a percentage of your residue estate.

Dying without a Will – When does it make sense?

Dying without a Will is a choice. You can choose whether to take the time to prepare a Will, or you can delay, postpone and procrastinate. But it is important to understand the consequences of dying without a Will, not just with the distribution of your possessions, but also with the “estate administration” process.

Hopefully at the end of this article the question in the title will be answered for you. It NEVER makes sense to die without a Will. It is a decision that you make that doesn’t impact you significantly (you will be dead), but it has serious repercussions for your family and loved-ones.

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Dying without a Will – the first few days

If something were to happen to you today, there is a good chance that your family would be struggling with grief. But quite quickly actions need to be taken and this would fall to your “next-of-kin”.

Although the UK doesn’t have a legal concept of “next-of-kin” it generally means your closest relative.

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Do I need a Will if I have no assets? Yes. A Will does so much more.

At LegalWills.co.uk, one of the most frequent questions we hear is “Do I need a Will?”.

When the answer is “yes”, we then hear the familiar response “But, I don’t own anything?”

If only things were that simple….

Do I need a Will?

British wealth

In 2014, the average net worth of a British adult was £147,134.  Now, depending on the equity built up in the home, if you remove that value from the net worth it still comes in at around £20,000. Therefore, even if you don’t own your own house, there could still be well over £20,000 that makes up a part of your estate after death.

According to the pension giant Aviva, most British middle aged people have typically built up private retirement savings and investments worth £53,793. Now, you might think that these figures don’t apply to you but equity can be found in unexpected sources from ISA’s to insurance plans and even the personal items you own within your house. Continue reading →

Planned Giving – Which charities are included in Wills?

“A note on Privacy: the protection and security of the documents created on our web site are of critical importance. In particular, we cannot access any information contained in a specific Will, nor can we read a person’s Will. However, we are able to access aggregated data from an encrypted database folder that summarizes the number of times particular choices have been made within our service. We cannot connect this information to individual accounts. It is this data that has been mined to provide the information on planned giving in this article”

At LegalWills.co.uk, we help thousands of people in the United Kingdom create their Last Will and Testament through our online Will service. A Will contains a lot of important information, such as who will receive your property when you pass on and who will be the guardians of your children, and it can also serve as a great way to give back to the charities you support upon your death. Leaving money or assets to a charity is called “planned giving,” – a service that LegalWills.co.uk offers for all its Wills. According the Charities Aid Foundation, “in terms of giving money to charity (either directly or through sponsorship of an individual), 70 per cent [of people in the UK] report doing so in the 12 months prior to interview [for the study], and 44 percent do so in a typical month.”

charitable bequests

This information evidently shows that charitable giving is an important part of the lives of many people, so we were interested in the level of “planned giving” going on in the United Kingdom. According to Russell James, the number of people aged 55+ with a charitable estate beneficiary hovers between 5% an 6%. Continue reading →

Writing your Will: 10 key steps to getting it done right.

We’ve been offering a service to help you prepare your own Will for 14 years now. To us, the task couldn’t be simpler. But as with anything that you only do a few times in your life, the process can seem intimidating. So we’d like to breakdown the steps involved in writing your Will. Hopefully after reading these pointers, you will feel less anxious and ready to finally cross this very important item off your To Do list.

Preparation

There are some important decisions to make before you start the process of writing your Will. Some of these require consultation with friends and family members. At LegalWills.co.uk we do not expect you to complete your Will in one sitting, but if you can discuss some of these decisions Continue reading →