The following is not legal advice for your situation, despite the occasional use of the second person. Rather, it is general commentary about how wills work.
There are four good options:
(1) do it yourself
(2) hire a lawyer ($200 - $3,000)
(3) use a legal forms service such as LegalZoom.com ($30 - $100)
(4) buy a how-to book from a company like Nolo ($15 - $40)
If you do it yourself, you will need to think about what you own, decide who you would like to get that stuff when you die, and then write your instructions down on a piece of paper. You should then find two adults who are (a) not your relatives, and (b) not mentioned in the will to be your witnesses. Reassure the witnesses that you are sane, thinking clearly, and acting of your own free will. Then sign the will by writing your name in both print and cursive at the bottom. Add today’s date. Then have each of your witnesses do the same. Have the witnesses write “witness” next to their signatures. Finally, make two photocopies of the will. Keep one in your desk for handy reference, give one to a friend or family member for publicity, and put the original in a safe deposit box at a bank for safekeeping.
If you decide to hire a lawyer, make sure the lawyer speaks a casual dialect of English in addition to legalese—a will that no one but lawyers can decipher will irritate your relatives. For free, you should expect to be able to briefly discuss what sort of will you want. After the discussion, insist on a flat fee that will cover drafting (writing), execution (signing) and an uncontested probating (publishing and enforcing) your will. Do not agree to an hourly rate unless there is a firm cap on the number of hours. If your relatives challenge your will, you will probably have to pay additional fees. If you think this is likely, set aside some money in your will to pay the legal expenses associated with publishing and enforcing your will.
No, nor that they print their own names. They just have to sign their names and date the signature. It’s also a good idea to have each of them initial every (numbered) page of your will; this proves that no pages have been inserted or deleted.
When I first started asking how to write a will, a couple of years ago, the best advice I got was to write the will myself — because this is free — and then reread it in a few months. Repeat this process until I couldn’t think of anything to add or change. Then visit a lawyer and have them translate it into legalese.
This is a fairly complex legal question. Depending on the size of your estate, you probably want to hire a lawyer. I believe you can find a number of legal services that will do flat-rate wills for (I think) a couple hundred bucks. This is probably most important if you have kids or a lot of assets.
If you don’t have kids, and you don’t have a lot of assets, or you seriously dislike lawyers, you can put together a will from a pre-made form and get witnesses (who are not beneficiaries) to sign the will, ideally in the presence of a notary public.
Legal documents are often highly technical and vary meaningfully from state to state. Some of this is defensible—you’d be surprised how things can get messed up—and some of it exists to keep lawyers employed. If it’s really important—if you are not a mostly asset-free student willing various odds and ends to family—it’s probably worth having it done professionally. Five or ten minutes on google searching for estate lawyers in your area will probably do the trick; or you can look for the fixed-rate will deals from bigger businesses that I mentioned earlier.
Well worth asking a lawyer, because they know some ins and outs. My wife and I did this after our first child was born. It was a few hundred bucks to get wills, general powers of attorney, and healthcare powers of attorney for both of us. (Our situation was simple: leave everything to each other or the kids if we both kick it, and designate a guardian for the kids). We’d have gotten living wills but haven’t decided what we want them to say.
The lawyer put in a bunch of things we would never have thought of, e.g.:
Making the will sibling-proof (it divides everything equally amongst all children we might end up having, which turned out to be 2)
Waiving the requirement that our out-of-State executor post a bond
Authorizing the executor to open safe deposit boxes and the like
Authorizing the executor to open safe deposit boxes and the like
Thinking about this instruction: Should I conclude that you should write down all your passwords and put them in a safe deposit box so your data will be recoverable by other people? (This is assuming you don’t care about privacy after death.)
I am in the process of doing this, having realised that the English intestacy laws would not produce a desirable outcome for my circumstances. I went to a lawyer, explained my wishes, and in a week or two I expect to receive a draft. Since my will is a simple one, the cost is (relative to what lawyers cost in general) fairly low: £210.
You can do it yourself, but I decided that it was worth the fee to have someone who knows exactly what they’re doing take care of the matter. My lawyers will also be my executors (long may the time be in coming), and will take care of secure storage of the will.
How does one find a lawyer? In my case, I looked on the web for local practices, eyeballed a few of their web sites, and from among those offering general legal services to private individuals, chose based on my general impression. This is probably suboptimal; personal recommendation from friends and colleagues might be a better way to go.
Related: a few years ago, I researched advance medical directives. They’re surprisingly easy to make in the USA. They made a federal law about it in 1990, so you just have to fill out a short form (which differs for each state). The forms for each state are all available here.
The main decisions are:
designating someone to make health decisions for you, when you’re unable
providing general guidance on whether to prolong your life in various situations
whether it’s ok to donate your organs to others
Fill out the form, store it and some copies somewhere sensible, and you’re done.
You can get a warm fuzzy feeling from doing it yourself with a downloaded form (say from Nolo) or a cheap app (like WillMaker), but there are subtle ways to mess up, so professional advice is highly recommended. Doing it yourself, you may tend to shy away from thinking about low-probability or painful scenarios, and you don’t get to debug it by changing it and trying again. A will is just one part of estate planning, and sometimes a will isn’t needed (if the estate is in a trust, its beneficiaries take precedence). Usually you’ll need to coordinate the will and your insurance coverage, at a minimum. But don’t procrastinate; you can really get burned by having no will at all. In Texas, for example, if you die married and intestate (no will), and you have kids by a previous marriage, your spouse is legally bound to give half of the estate to his/her step-children immediately. Probably not what you would have planned.
How do you write a will?
The following is not legal advice for your situation, despite the occasional use of the second person. Rather, it is general commentary about how wills work.
There are four good options: (1) do it yourself (2) hire a lawyer ($200 - $3,000) (3) use a legal forms service such as LegalZoom.com ($30 - $100) (4) buy a how-to book from a company like Nolo ($15 - $40)
If you do it yourself, you will need to think about what you own, decide who you would like to get that stuff when you die, and then write your instructions down on a piece of paper. You should then find two adults who are (a) not your relatives, and (b) not mentioned in the will to be your witnesses. Reassure the witnesses that you are sane, thinking clearly, and acting of your own free will. Then sign the will by writing your name in both print and cursive at the bottom. Add today’s date. Then have each of your witnesses do the same. Have the witnesses write “witness” next to their signatures. Finally, make two photocopies of the will. Keep one in your desk for handy reference, give one to a friend or family member for publicity, and put the original in a safe deposit box at a bank for safekeeping.
If you decide to hire a lawyer, make sure the lawyer speaks a casual dialect of English in addition to legalese—a will that no one but lawyers can decipher will irritate your relatives. For free, you should expect to be able to briefly discuss what sort of will you want. After the discussion, insist on a flat fee that will cover drafting (writing), execution (signing) and an uncontested probating (publishing and enforcing) your will. Do not agree to an hourly rate unless there is a firm cap on the number of hours. If your relatives challenge your will, you will probably have to pay additional fees. If you think this is likely, set aside some money in your will to pay the legal expenses associated with publishing and enforcing your will.
Is it actually important that the witnesses be the ones to write “witness”? If so, why?
No, nor that they print their own names. They just have to sign their names and date the signature. It’s also a good idea to have each of them initial every (numbered) page of your will; this proves that no pages have been inserted or deleted.
When I first started asking how to write a will, a couple of years ago, the best advice I got was to write the will myself — because this is free — and then reread it in a few months. Repeat this process until I couldn’t think of anything to add or change. Then visit a lawyer and have them translate it into legalese.
No. Sorry about that.
This is a fairly complex legal question. Depending on the size of your estate, you probably want to hire a lawyer. I believe you can find a number of legal services that will do flat-rate wills for (I think) a couple hundred bucks. This is probably most important if you have kids or a lot of assets.
If you don’t have kids, and you don’t have a lot of assets, or you seriously dislike lawyers, you can put together a will from a pre-made form and get witnesses (who are not beneficiaries) to sign the will, ideally in the presence of a notary public.
Legal documents are often highly technical and vary meaningfully from state to state. Some of this is defensible—you’d be surprised how things can get messed up—and some of it exists to keep lawyers employed. If it’s really important—if you are not a mostly asset-free student willing various odds and ends to family—it’s probably worth having it done professionally. Five or ten minutes on google searching for estate lawyers in your area will probably do the trick; or you can look for the fixed-rate will deals from bigger businesses that I mentioned earlier.
Well worth asking a lawyer, because they know some ins and outs. My wife and I did this after our first child was born. It was a few hundred bucks to get wills, general powers of attorney, and healthcare powers of attorney for both of us. (Our situation was simple: leave everything to each other or the kids if we both kick it, and designate a guardian for the kids). We’d have gotten living wills but haven’t decided what we want them to say.
The lawyer put in a bunch of things we would never have thought of, e.g.:
Making the will sibling-proof (it divides everything equally amongst all children we might end up having, which turned out to be 2)
Waiving the requirement that our out-of-State executor post a bond
Authorizing the executor to open safe deposit boxes and the like
Thinking about this instruction: Should I conclude that you should write down all your passwords and put them in a safe deposit box so your data will be recoverable by other people? (This is assuming you don’t care about privacy after death.)
I am in the process of doing this, having realised that the English intestacy laws would not produce a desirable outcome for my circumstances. I went to a lawyer, explained my wishes, and in a week or two I expect to receive a draft. Since my will is a simple one, the cost is (relative to what lawyers cost in general) fairly low: £210.
You can do it yourself, but I decided that it was worth the fee to have someone who knows exactly what they’re doing take care of the matter. My lawyers will also be my executors (long may the time be in coming), and will take care of secure storage of the will.
How does one find a lawyer? In my case, I looked on the web for local practices, eyeballed a few of their web sites, and from among those offering general legal services to private individuals, chose based on my general impression. This is probably suboptimal; personal recommendation from friends and colleagues might be a better way to go.
I used Quicken Willmaker, which is very easy to use. You can get the basic version for less than twenty bucks on Amazon.
Related: a few years ago, I researched advance medical directives. They’re surprisingly easy to make in the USA. They made a federal law about it in 1990, so you just have to fill out a short form (which differs for each state). The forms for each state are all available here.
The main decisions are:
designating someone to make health decisions for you, when you’re unable
providing general guidance on whether to prolong your life in various situations
whether it’s ok to donate your organs to others
Fill out the form, store it and some copies somewhere sensible, and you’re done.
You can get a warm fuzzy feeling from doing it yourself with a downloaded form (say from Nolo) or a cheap app (like WillMaker), but there are subtle ways to mess up, so professional advice is highly recommended. Doing it yourself, you may tend to shy away from thinking about low-probability or painful scenarios, and you don’t get to debug it by changing it and trying again. A will is just one part of estate planning, and sometimes a will isn’t needed (if the estate is in a trust, its beneficiaries take precedence). Usually you’ll need to coordinate the will and your insurance coverage, at a minimum. But don’t procrastinate; you can really get burned by having no will at all. In Texas, for example, if you die married and intestate (no will), and you have kids by a previous marriage, your spouse is legally bound to give half of the estate to his/her step-children immediately. Probably not what you would have planned.