WHY MAKE A WILL?
Do you really want to take a risk?
Making a Will is the best way of making sure that what happens to your property is in accord with your wishes. Even if you have no family, you will want to make sure that your possessions go where you wish – perhaps friends who have supported you or charities that you have supported during your lifetime.
The fact is that, if you die without a Will, the law decides how your possessions will be divided up amongst your family. Even remote cousins could be legally entitled to a share in what you own.
You can easily imagine the kind of problems this can create and frequently does when someone dies without a Will. What’s more, the question, ‘Who gets what?’ can lead to complicated legal disputes. The family may have to wait months or even years for the whole matter to be sorted out and may lead to huge legal costs in the process.
Don’t assume, ‘my other half will get everything’! Without a Will, if you have children your spouse may inherit only part of your estate. If you have no children your spouse may have to share your estate with his or her parents-in-laws.
Perhaps one of the most important reasons for writing a Will is for the protection of your children. You should consider who would look after your children in the event of your death. The only safe way is to make this known through your Will. If there is no Will, then the Court will decide on the future of your children, and it may not be what you would have wished.
CO-HABITING
Don’t assume that cohabiting couples have the same legal rights to inherit as a married couple. Presently without a valid Will, unmarried couples or couples not in a civil partnership have no guaranteed rights to inherit whatsoever and married couples or couples in a civil partnership can only guarantee to inherit if there is a valid Will.
Therefore, it is absolutely essential that cohabitees have Wills drafted if they wish to provide for their partners.
If one of the cohabitees owns the house solely, and dies, the other cohabitee has no automatic rights to live there nor to make any financial claim upon the sale of the property. The only person entitled to live there, or benefit from the sale, is the person who owns the property. It is very difficult to prove an interest in the property if there is no written agreement.
If the property is jointly owned as Tenants in Common, each owns a share of the property. If one cohabitee dies intestate, that share of the property would be distributed to relatives under the Intestacy Rules. To provide security and peace of mind to the surviving cohabitee it is essential that their Wills mirror each other and give their share of the property to the other.
It is absolutely critical for cohabitees to make a Will. Unless there is a Will there is no guaranteeing that their partner will be provided for after death.
A cohabiting couple have few rights under the law when their relationship terminates. However, the Law Reform (Succession) Act 1995 now makes provision, which on the death of a cohabite, a claim may be made for provision under the Inheritance (Provision for Families and Dependents) Act 1975 rather than under the Intestacy Rules, as was the case previously. A new section was added to the 1975 Act for a cohabitee to make a claim providing they have lived together during the whole of the previous two years in the same household as husband and wife.