Beware Bargain Wills!

We all pay out annually for insuring our house, car and even ourselves, so why skimp on something as important as your Will? Stop and think carefully about this for a moment. Most people are novices at Wills and Estate Planning, so do you really think you are going to get the best advice with a cheap Will?

The usual catch is that the bank or a solicitor appoints themselves as either sole or joint Executor in your Will, thereby at a later date, forcing bereaving relatives to pay through the nose for probate services when the client has died and can no longer do anything about it. After all, the client signed it, so they must have been happy with it, right? The question is, were they fully informed of the likely future costs at the time?  So what is the cost of probate? Well, when you know where to shop it does not have to cost the earth but it could easily cost you between 2% and 4% of the value of your estate. You can work that bit out for yourself. What you should consider is the ‘whole of life cost’ of writing a Will including safe document storage, updates and probate. We all do it with larger purchases like houses and cars, so why not do it with your Will? It makes sense.

Yes of course, a lot of us choose on price and very often get an acceptable job done; will you be happy with acceptable? Others choose on quality and service and personal recommendation, which is where the majority of our business comes from. We have come across clients who have done postal Wills (and sometimes even asked us to fill them out!), others go online and hope to get it right, and we have even come across a lady who was thinking about using someone that stood on Leicester Market to write her Will. There is no point having a Will unless you are sure it is going to work when the time comes.

We frequently review client’s old Wills, some can be 30+ years old and be well out of date, no longer reflecting the client’s wishes by a long way. It is always disappointing to think that no one has bothered to contact them to see if an update is needed. It is important, very important. With some willwriting practices it does seem to be a case of taking the money, keeping quiet, safe in the knowledge that there will also be a handsome probate fee to collect in the future if it isn’t updated.