Hi, I’m Bridget Mackay, an attorney and I practice in the area of wills, trusts, and estate planning. If you’re following my January blogs, I’m dedicating the whole month to going over some of the basic things that you want to put into your estate plan. Today I’m going to talk a little about wills.
It is the traditional form of an estate plan. They’ve been around for ever and they are the traditional way to pass wealth from one generation to the other. They function in the sense that you can say, as the person who is making the will, where you want your things to go when you die, all your possessions. We often think of Leona Helmsley… I mean, even if it’s a crazy request like Leona Helmsley leaving everything to her dog. You can do this in a will and it is sort of the main piece of an estate plan.
If you have small children; the other function it does is transfer guardianship for those small children. That’s the only document it can be done in. If you have children under the age of 18 and you want to designate a guardian for them, if you’re… You pass away while they’re still minors, the document in which you do it is a will. So you may ask who does need a will? Well, if you have assets that are under $100,000, then you can use a will. Anything over $100,000, we might want to talk about a living trust, which is going to be in a subsequent blog. And if you have minor children you definitely want a will.
What happens when you die if you have a will? This is a question that often comes up for me. Let’s say we put a will together and you pass away. If you have a will, in order for your beneficiaries in your will, or your heirs, or your children to get your assets, it will have to go through a court process called Probate; which is another subject I’m going to talk a little more about. But the only thing you need to remember is that if you have a will you’re going to go through Probate, which is a whole different process of transferring assets, which is different then a living trust. And rest assured I will describe all of those processes in my future blogs. But for now, that’s the basic information on a will, about what it does and who might need one
