Category — Do It Yourself

I would like to make a difference between self made Wills where you copy some one else’s Will or draft your Will all by yourself versus having a guided approach. When you create a self made Will, chances are there will be mistakes or you could overlook something.

A common mistake a person inexperience in drafting their Will is giving everything to say A, and then later specify an individual item, say a watch to B. Another mistake is getting the percentages or fractions wrong and leaving some portion not distributed. For instance, you give 50% of your home to your spouse, 30% to son No.1 and then forgot you have another 20% left over.

Writing a Will without having a residual clause is another common mistake. I’ve seen quite a few such Wills. With this mistake, what happens is that your estate is considered partial intestate i.e. your Will does not cover the whole estate. This can happen when you acquired additional assets but did not write them in your Will. A residual clause would cater for such assets.

These are pitfalls if you copy someone else’s Will or if you draft the whole Will yourself especially if no one take a second look. However, with Wills that are written with software whether installed in your computer or online, the software is designed to catch such mistakes. Good quality software will prevent you from writing such mistakes even if you deliberately try to do so.

This sample Will is the actual Will of former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren Burger. It is reproduced below.

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LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF WARREN E. BURGER I hereby make and declare the following to be my last will and testament.1. My executors will first pay all claims against my estate;2. The remainder of my estate will be distributed as follows: one- third to my daughter, Margaret Elizabeth Burger Rose and two- thirds to my son, Wade A. Burger;3. I designate and appoint as executors of this will, Wade A. Burger and J. Michael Luttig.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand to this my Last Will and Testament this 9th day of June, 1994.

/s/Warren E. Burger

We hereby certify that in our presence on the date written above WARREN E. BURGER signed the foregoing instrument and declared it to be his Last Will and Testament and that at this request in his presence and in the presence of each other we have signed our names below as witnesses.

/s/Nathaniel E. Brady residing at 120 F St., NW, Washington, DC

/s/Alice M. Khu residing at 3041 Meeting St., Falls Church, VA

My thoughts about this Will: [Read more →]

Like I mentioned earlier, the alternative to online Wills is a Do It Yourself Will software. While you can get a sample will from a friend or look for it online, I suggest that you go with the guided approach.

You can make quite a lot of mistakes by cut and past because you won’t realize why that particular Will is written that way. Before I use online Wills services, I got a few sample Wills and tried to use them as a template. Finally I gave up because is was just too much trouble trying to understand why something was in the sample Will.

I found that the language that is used in do it yourself Will software is much easier to understand and I knew why I selected certain items. One DIY will software you can consider is from Quicken’s Willmaker.

If you are in a hurry, you can just download the software or if you prefer, you can order a CD and have it delivered to you.

Three points worth mentioning:-

1. the program accumulates the names of people you mention into an editable contact list. The next time you need them you can simply select them from a list. I think this is useful rather than re-typing the information again.
2. it seems there is no option to list two or more alternate executors to serve one at a time in the order named. The only way to list two or more alternate executors is to have two or more of them serve together. It might not serve your purpose if you want to do so.
3. You can use the software for others as well.

I did have some problems installing this software but managed to get it installed the third time round. If you use a Mac computer, then I suggest that you just use online Wills services since the software is not designed for it.

Update

Nolo released the latest edition to this software and it is available here.