Are you and your spouse a lovey dovey couple?
As a lovey dovey couple, did both of you decide that when either of you die, everything you or your spouse own will be given to the survivor?
You did?
Good. Then you have joined a lot of responsible people who wants to do what’s right for their spouse — and their children!
Unfortunately, making such decisions is not enough. Have you thought about how to go about doing it? When I married 21 years ago, I told my wife: let’s write a simple letter saying we will give our assets and personal belongings to each other if we die.
So we did just that. We prepared a one-paragraph letter, signed it and kept it away … in our dressing table’s drawer.
Now, while our intention was good, the execution of our intention was … uh, not so good, lah, to say the very least.
In those naive young days, we did not know much about the law. We knew we had to plan together for a future eventuality but we didn’t know how to do it properly. There was nobody to guide us. In short, we didn’t even know that what we needed was a proper Will, and that piece of paper was a poor attempt at writing one.
It was much, much later that we realised that what we had done was not good enough.
Writing a Will is actually a very simple process if you know how to go about it. However, this simple process can be difficult because a proper Will must meet with the requirements of the law.
For instance, I would need two witnesses for my Will. I didn’t even have one, and my wife did not qualify as a witness because she was my main beneficiary.
I also failed to name my executor because I didn’t realise the need for one. I had assumed that it was a simple process and my wife could get everything settled easily when I die, just like I would do the same for her.
We were also planning a family and back in those days, our children would still be toddlers if we were to die. Who would be their legal guardian to take care of them in our absence?
So you see, these shortcomings meant that if anything were to happen to one of us then, that piece of paper would have been next to worthless.
My advice to you is this: if you want to write a proper Will, don’t follow my footsteps of 21 years ago. Get professional help; don’t do it yourself. Murphy’s Law applies. There is always a chance that you can go wrong with a self-written Will and when things do go wrong when you are already dead, there is no way to turn back the clock.
Nowadays, getting your Will written competently is so easy. Apart from the lawyers, there are professional will-writers in this country who can do an equally admirable job.