Against all odds, it turns out I’m a grown-up now. If I die, go missing, or am rendered incapable of looking after myself, significant sums of money become available to my next-of-kin. I’ve started assembling a document for them to hold onto in case of these eventualities.
I have two questions to throw at LWers who may have dealt with this sort of thing before:
1) The whole process of making a will seems a bit excessive to my needs. I don’t have a complicated estate or children or anything, and trust my next-of-kin to respect my wishes or act in my best interests if it becomes necessary. Solicitor’s fees seem like an unnecessary expense. I just want to collect all the salient details into one location for convenience. Are there any good reasons why I might want to revise this judgement?
2) The basic document so far consists of a list of bank accounts, financial assets, insurance policy numbers, contact numbers for my GP, workplace, etc., and miscellaneous other details that might prove useful. Are there any sensible bits of information I might want to bundle up with this that I probably haven’t thought about?
Regarding your first point: if your immediate next-of-kin is unable to take care of things, do you trust whoever is next-nearest to respect your wishes? How confident are you that this will still be the case after time (t) has passed?
My experience with a few friends and relatives: often such informal estate planning is done as a one-off, in a moment of forward thinking, and then left as is, sometimes for years. Unexpected changes in the views of the next of kin (in my family’s case, various religious conversions) led to all kinds of family disputes related to different opinions about what the desires and intentions of the deceased might have been—and whether they are even relevant if none were formally expressed.
1) Your local jurisdiction will have some manner of default will—a piece of legislation somewhere that says who gets what in the event that you die intestate. Look up a summary online. If its provisions bug you, you should probably get a will. If you’re cool with it, then you don’t necessarily need one. However, if you have an estate big enough that your relatives will sue each other for a piece of it(>$100k USD net worth, say), an estate that is somehow complex(trust funds, assets you want to go somewhere in particular, scumbag relatives you want to cut out, etc.), or children, I would advise getting one regardless. I know some estate lawyers, and the stories they tell are hair-curling. I know that’s a biased source, because they don’t see much of the simple cases, but it’s an insurance policy I plan to get as soon as I have enough assets to be worth paying for it.
Also, when you’re getting one, get a power of attorney set up. Most people don’t do that even when they do get a will done, and it’s a pretty ugly oversight if something goes wrong.
This comment was helpful. I still don’t think I need a will right now (too few relatives and assets), but I’ve adjusted down my estimate of when I might.
Identity theft and general info-sec is obviously a concern, but the way I see it, I either trust someone to safeguard these details or I don’t.
I can try and minimise the chances of the document being compromised. I briefly considered some sort of encrypted flash drive business, but I figure a hard-copy subject to physical security measures is probably a lot safer than something that can be drag-and-dropped onto a Windows Vista desktop. I can also minimise the amount of personally-identifying information in the document, so anyone obtaining the document without context wouldn’t know who these various assets and policies applied to.
My plan is to produce two physical documents and give them to two geographically-disparate immediate family members for safekeeping.
Safe deposit boxes also store a number of other documents securely, such as passports, title deeds to property, birth certificates, etc. In addition to any jewelry or whatever with large cash value, if you have any.
But if he has too low a net worth to make a will worthwhile, what are the odds he has anything safety-deposit-box-worthy? Spending fifty bucks a year to hold your passport seems terribly inefficient—it’s not so valuable that an occasional replacement will be worse.
Against all odds, it turns out I’m a grown-up now. If I die, go missing, or am rendered incapable of looking after myself, significant sums of money become available to my next-of-kin. I’ve started assembling a document for them to hold onto in case of these eventualities.
I have two questions to throw at LWers who may have dealt with this sort of thing before:
1) The whole process of making a will seems a bit excessive to my needs. I don’t have a complicated estate or children or anything, and trust my next-of-kin to respect my wishes or act in my best interests if it becomes necessary. Solicitor’s fees seem like an unnecessary expense. I just want to collect all the salient details into one location for convenience. Are there any good reasons why I might want to revise this judgement?
2) The basic document so far consists of a list of bank accounts, financial assets, insurance policy numbers, contact numbers for my GP, workplace, etc., and miscellaneous other details that might prove useful. Are there any sensible bits of information I might want to bundle up with this that I probably haven’t thought about?
Regarding your first point: if your immediate next-of-kin is unable to take care of things, do you trust whoever is next-nearest to respect your wishes? How confident are you that this will still be the case after time (t) has passed?
My experience with a few friends and relatives: often such informal estate planning is done as a one-off, in a moment of forward thinking, and then left as is, sometimes for years. Unexpected changes in the views of the next of kin (in my family’s case, various religious conversions) led to all kinds of family disputes related to different opinions about what the desires and intentions of the deceased might have been—and whether they are even relevant if none were formally expressed.
1) Your local jurisdiction will have some manner of default will—a piece of legislation somewhere that says who gets what in the event that you die intestate. Look up a summary online. If its provisions bug you, you should probably get a will. If you’re cool with it, then you don’t necessarily need one. However, if you have an estate big enough that your relatives will sue each other for a piece of it(>$100k USD net worth, say), an estate that is somehow complex(trust funds, assets you want to go somewhere in particular, scumbag relatives you want to cut out, etc.), or children, I would advise getting one regardless. I know some estate lawyers, and the stories they tell are hair-curling. I know that’s a biased source, because they don’t see much of the simple cases, but it’s an insurance policy I plan to get as soon as I have enough assets to be worth paying for it.
Also, when you’re getting one, get a power of attorney set up. Most people don’t do that even when they do get a will done, and it’s a pretty ugly oversight if something goes wrong.
This comment was helpful. I still don’t think I need a will right now (too few relatives and assets), but I’ve adjusted down my estimate of when I might.
What would happen if the document gets stolen?
Identity theft and general info-sec is obviously a concern, but the way I see it, I either trust someone to safeguard these details or I don’t.
I can try and minimise the chances of the document being compromised. I briefly considered some sort of encrypted flash drive business, but I figure a hard-copy subject to physical security measures is probably a lot safer than something that can be drag-and-dropped onto a Windows Vista desktop. I can also minimise the amount of personally-identifying information in the document, so anyone obtaining the document without context wouldn’t know who these various assets and policies applied to.
My plan is to produce two physical documents and give them to two geographically-disparate immediate family members for safekeeping.
A safe deposit box is probably worth the cost.
It’s far more expensive than the will that he felt wasn’t worth paying for.
Safe deposit boxes also store a number of other documents securely, such as passports, title deeds to property, birth certificates, etc. In addition to any jewelry or whatever with large cash value, if you have any.
But if he has too low a net worth to make a will worthwhile, what are the odds he has anything safety-deposit-box-worthy? Spending fifty bucks a year to hold your passport seems terribly inefficient—it’s not so valuable that an occasional replacement will be worse.
Nowadays most paper documents are just a convenience (or an inconvenience). What really matters is the proper entry in some database in the cloud.
Replacing a missing passport, title deed, etc. is neither hard nor expensive.