Keeping Your Will Up-to-Date

If you have written a will then you have made a fantastic start in the process of ensuring that your intentions, both financial and otherwise, are carried out as you would have wished after your death.

The act of making a will, indeed, places you in a relatively small proportion of people in the UK whose estate should avoid intestacy laws. However, making one will to last you your entire life may well not be enough. Significant changes may well occur between the time at which you write your will and the time of your death, and these may well have an effect on the content of the document. As a result, it is vitally important that you keep your will up to date.

Life Events

It is generally thought that you should review the content of your will at the time of a major ‘life event’. These might include a change in your financial circumstances; the birth of a child; the death of a close relative; a change in your living arrangements; and, perhaps most importantly, a marriage, civil partnership or divorce. Any of these events may have a significant impact on your will, and on your intentions with regards to the disbursement of your estate.

Keeping your will up to date is, in many ways, of equal importance to creating the document in the first place. Indeed, if you don’t ensure that your will is as current as possible, it may cause serious legal problems after your death. If, for example, you marry after writing your will but there is no mention of the impending marriage in the document, then there is a good chance that the entire document will be declared invalid, and that your estate will be dealt with according to the laws of intestacy.

Similarly, if you have a child after having written your will, they may not automatically become a beneficiary even if you have named your other children. As a result, in order to ensure that your wishes are carried out, you must update the document when events such as these occur.

Re-writing

After particularly significant events, such as the death of a spouse or civil partner, you may wish to re-write the entire will. At the beginning of every will is a sentence outlining the fact that the current document revokes all previous such documents; this means that, were you to write a completely new will, the previous document would no longer have any legal relevance. It is also possible, however, that you may wish simply to alter certain parts of your will (for example to add or remove a beneficiary). This is also perfectly possible but, as with the process of writing the document to begin with, it is recommended that you do so under the guidance of a legal professional. Many people worry about the cost of doing this, but it should be minimal; indeed, if you are over 55 you should qualify for Cancer Research’s Free Will Service, which will allow you to employ a local solicitor to make the changes, at no cost to you.

You should remember, however, that costs may be incurred if you are employing a third party to store your will. The UK Will Registry, for example, requires a small fee (currently around £20) for each time you make an alteration. However, given the potential drawbacks of not keeping the document up to date, this would seem like money well spent.