Preventing Challenges to Your Will

If your choices for who will get what after you die are controversial, according to your family, you may be worried that they'll contest the will after you die, putting your intended beneficiaries through a very tough time. The more you can do to make your will airtight, the better. But it's not as simple as stating plainly who gets what. You've got to put a few strategies to work.

Sign It!

This is such a silly thing, or so it seems, but sometimes people forget to sign their own wills. This tends to happen with people who prepare their own will and never consult an estate planning attorney. They don't realize that just writing things down isn't enough. It's a simple mistake to remedy when you're still alive, but it's devastating when the mistake is discovered after you die as that opens the door to many lawsuits challenging the will. Always be sure you've signed the will with your legal name.

Ensure Your Witnesses Are Not Beneficiaries

Legally, the witnesses who sign your will after you do cannot be beneficiaries of anything in your estate. Of course, if you've never dealt with a will before, you might not know that. And, if your will is found after your death to have been signed by beneficiaries, that's going to delay everything as courts try to figure out who the estate should go to, opening up a huge window for disputes. Double-check that the people you want to have as witnesses are not beneficiaries.

Use Airtight Wording

This is one of the tougher tasks: You have to ensure the wording you use is airtight, that it can't be successfully challenged and that it's clear that anyone who expected to benefit, but who didn't end up with a lot, was left out deliberately by you. For this type of wording, you really want an estate lawyer to look over what you've written. Let the lawyer know what you want to accomplish so that the lawyer knows what to look for.

Address Leaving Out Beneficiaries Directly

Sometimes, when you have a family that can turn anything into a dispute, it's best to tell people ahead of time what to expect from your will. Then, they can discuss it with you if they don't like it. But other times, you never want to hint to your family about what's coming up because you know they have the wrong temperament for calm discussion. If you can't tell people ahead of time, make it very clear in the will, as mentioned previously, why you divided up your estate as you did.

Contact a law firm like Young and Muggleton for more information. 

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