updating

There are many good reasons for updating a Will. You may have named a guardian who is no longer the ideal choice. Your children may become adults, get married, or have children or their own. Your appointment of Executor may no longer be the best choice. In general, we recommend that you review your Will annually and update your Will if appropriate. If you prepared your Will using a lawyer, there may be a significant cost to updating your Will. The service at USLegalWills.com allows you to make unlimited updates all the time your account is active.

Updating your Will. When? How? and How much?

We recently commissioned a survey to determine how many Americans didn’t have a Will. But we added a question that most surveys don’t ask; “Do you have a Will, but you consider it to be out-of-date?”. People often feel that it’s difficult to get their Will written. But updating a Will can be just as onerous and expensive.

For Americans over the age of 65, over 15% had a Will in place, that they regarded as out-of-date.

Traditionally, writing a Will has been an expensive and inconvenient process. You would need to make an appointment with a lawyer. If you lived with a spouse or partner, you would need to co-ordinate this appointment with their schedule. You may even need to arrange childcare. Writing a Will with a lawyer is rarely done in one visit. You may need to discuss certain decisions with loved ones. You would certainly have to return to sign the documents after they have been prepared.

As a result, people have traditionally thought of Will writing as a once-in-a-lifetime activity. They would wait until that perfect time in their life to write their Will. A point in their life when nothing would likely change.

The problem is, that time never came, and as a result 65% of American adults don’t have an up-to-date Will in place.

Continue reading →

How to write a Will – key steps to successfully writing your Will

Do you want to know how to write a Will? Even though writing a Will is one of the most important things that everyone ought to do, most of us are very good at avoiding the issue. Most people put off the task of writing a Will, even though it is one of the most important things that we can do for our family.

The one thing that you should not be apprehensive about is that you do not know how to write a Will. There are plenty of resources out there to help you.

None of us really wants to think about our own demise, so putting off writing a Will seems like the easier option. Unfortunately, the reality is that if we don’t deal with the task of writing a Will, we leave our loved ones with huge potential difficulties.

Most people don’t make a Will – but you should not use this as an excuse! Writing a Will ought to be a very painless process and it can be quite affordable. Do not worry that you do not know how to write a Will. Continue reading →

Writing your Will: we can help with the definitive guide

As with any task that comes to mind on odd occasions in your life, writing your Will can seem overwhelming. So much so, that most people don’t do it. However, if you are coming to this page, something that probably happened in your life to make you realize that writing a Will is a vitally important task.

Sadly most people who feel an immediate need to prepare their Will just do a Google search for a local estate planning attorney. They make an appointment, pay several hundreds or thousands of dollars and live with the peace of mind that the task is finally off their To Do list. As long as they don’t need to update it.

However, with a little research, you will quickly understand that writing your Will needn’t be difficult, inconvenient or expensive

Here are ten quick steps to writing your Will; Continue reading →

Writing a Legal Will: the worst advice we have seen yet

Much of our customer support effort is spent on correcting misunderstandings that have usually arisen from bad information that has been posted on the Internet. As with anything that you do once or twice in your lifetime, the terms will be unfamiliar, and there will be a lot to learn. But the task is made that much more difficult by woefully incorrect information that proliferates on different “advice blogs”. The example at the top of the page is from a reasonably well respected resource at Nerdwallet (we couldn’t help but post a comment under their article, so they may have fixed it if you click through). But this staff writer, who doesn’t appear to have any legal training has written; Continue reading →