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A personal tale on the value of wills – Emma Mason

by: Emma Mason
  • 23/01/2014
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A personal tale on the value of wills – Emma Mason
This blog normally covers all issues related to social media however I hope you’ll forgive me if I go off on something of a tangent this time.

The old saying about the only two certainties in life being ‘death and taxes’ has been brought home to me very recently and, without going into too much detail, two very close members of my family have passed away in the past six months.

Grieving for someone close to you is hard enough however there is always the need to deal with all manner of issues following a person’s death – I believe the phrase is ‘getting their affairs in order’.

This activity normally involves following various paper trails and ensuring that the individual’s wishes are carried out – which is obviously much easier if there’s a will in place that details all of this. In the case of my two family members we have worked in two very different circumstances, with only one person having a will.

Having that will has meant we have been able to rest easy and let the process follow a natural progression.

Everything was set up to allow us to focus on our personal response to their passing and not have to get bogged down, and overwhelmed with worry, about how the assets would be divided and the beneficiaries catered for.

The difference with the person who did not have a will in place has been extreme – firstly, where do you start? How do you collate all their assets together? How do you get access to those assets? How do you begin to understand what they might have wanted to do with those assets? Who might the beneficiaries have been? It has been a nightmare and it means that the time when we should have been grieving for our loved one has been taken away from us as we have had to become embroiled in a bureaucratic mess.

In this situation you lose count of the number of times you sat (or think) ‘if only’. If only they had made a will – it needn’t have been the most complex but even a simple statement regarding the assets and the beneficiaries would have been such a vast improvement on what we have been left with. Compare this to the other situation where their affairs were left in order before they passed and it should be a lesson to all those people who are going about their daily routine without a will in place.

It might not be pleasant but making a will ensures that both you and your loved ones have peace of mind about what happens following death.

To that end, I would implore any adviser who sees a client without a will to make sure they do not leave their family high and dry should the worse happen. My feeling is that it should be some sort of statutory responsibility to have a will however I suspect this will be a step too far for the legislators. The good news is that advisers are in a position to make this a reality for all their clients. While death is inevitable for all of us, leaving the family with the nightmare of trying to sort out their affairs without a will is not.

Emma-Marie Mason is business development manager at Blacks Connect

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