Planning for the Unexpected: What Happens to Your Estate?

One of the biggest questions in life is what happens to us when we die. Where do we go? Is there anywhere to go? What happens to your body? Well, we know what happens to our bodies when we die as that’s been extensively studied. The one question that does often come up is what will happen to your estate when you die? Now, if you have a will in place, you’ll know exactly what will happen to your estate when you die. But what do you do if you haven’t got around to writing a will, and you die before that happens?

During the course of your life, you might choose to use services like Clearly Quick Estate Liquidators to get your home ready to sell and on the market. You could cite something like this happening in your will so that you can ensure that your estate is sold properly. It should be a priority of yours to decide what happens to your belongings and who gets what when you die. Without this being a priority, you cannot know what happens to all of your worldly possessions, your estate and everything you own when you die. So, if you don’t want a court to divide your estate up when you die, planning your estate is important. Let’s take a closer look at what happens to your state when you die.

The court could handle it. In some cases the court could handle your estate. The courts will usually attempt to honor the wishes of the deceased as to how they want their estate distributed. If you’ve passed away without a will, they may need to have enough evidence to determine what your wishes are – the evidence is your will! If you don’t have a will, the court cannot divide up your state the way that you want them to divide it. Instead, they look to statutes because it will make presumptions when there’s no will in place. The statute is the default and the rules are such because it is such an old area of law. If you plan your estate in advance with a will, then your court will not divide up your assets for you, it will come down to the paperwork that you put in place before you died. If that doesn’t spell out the importance of a will, we don’t know what does!

Instead of the above, you could attempt to write your own will. This wouldn’t be good advice without giving you the caveat that writing your own will isn’t always the best thing to do. You are more than welcome to write down what you want for after you die, but you need to have this done with an attorney present. A DIY will isn’t always valid and it doesn’t meet the statutory requirements of a will. For example, if you were to get a letter from a grandparent, to be considered as a formal will it has to be signed by the grandparents and two individual witnesses and they have to have signed it within a reasonable time after they wrote the  will in the first place. As you can see, it can get pretty complicated. There are specific rules to writing a will, and you need to make sure that this has been properly executed.