trusts

Trusts are set up to pass ownership of some property or money while giving control over the asset to somebody else. They are often set up when a young child receives an inheritance. The young child owns the inheritance but it is kept in trust and managed by a trustee who looks after the best interests of the child until they are old enough to receive the inheritance directly.

Writing a Will for the non-traditional family

Many of us now live in non-traditional, or “non-nuclear” families. According to Encyclopedia Brittanica “A nuclear family, elementary family or conjugal family is a family group consisting of two parents and their children (one or more).”

It is the classic family structure which is still common, but according to every statistical analysis, a decreasing number of families meet this criteria.

We are seeing far more one-parent families, “blended” or “stepfamilies” where one partner is not the biological parent of the children, civil partnerships and three parents living under the same roof.

According to data coming from the Office for National Statistics, the number of marriage rate has halved in the UK since the 1970’s. In 2017, the married or civil partner couple family remains the most common, but the cohabiting couple family growing the fastest (doubling from 1996). In fact, about half the population of the UK are either single, divorced, widowed or in a civil partnership.

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The Will kit: 20 ways that a blank form Will kit could lead to disaster

Why do I need to pay to create a Will using your service, when I can get a free one downloaded from the internet, or buy a blank Will kit from WHSmith for a couple of pounds.

We get this question a lot, and it is sometimes difficult for people to fully understand the difference between using an online Will writing services like the one at LegalWills.co.uk compared to using a blank Will kit.

To illustrate the difference, we have highlighted just 20 ways in which using a blank Will kit can lead to a disaster. Because, ironically, the simpler the Will kit, the more difficult it is to write a well drafted Will. You may find it interesting that these were culled from an initial list of 45!!

1. You don’t check where the Will kit came from and who created it.

Blank Will Kit

Before you download a free Will kit template, stop and think about who actually prepared the template. Nowadays anybody can set up a professional looking legal website for free using WordPress in about 2 hours. Continue reading →

What’s the problem with blank Will forms? They don’t work !

We always position our service as a happy mid-ground between expensive solicitor fees and the blank Will forms that you can download from the internet or buy from WHSmiths. The finished product of using an interactive online Will service is usually identical to a Last Will and Testament prepared by a solicitor. After all, a solicitor doesn’t write a Will starting with a blank sheet of paper, they use what are known as “Will precedents” or clauses that are historically established, and are known to work. Most solicitors actually use “Parker’s modern Will precedents” and this is the exact same reference book used by LegalWills.co.uk.

Will forms

We’ve adapted the established Last Will and Testament clauses into an interactive online Will service. So how does the end result compare Continue reading →

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 →