DIY Will Storage?

For those of you who write a DIY Will, the question of ‘Will storage’ after signing remains as a very important issue as well. In fact it is important regardless of how you write your Will.

The job of ensuring those you want to benefit from your estate is not finished once your Will is signed. To be effective it has to be kept somewhere safe, secure and where it can be found when the time comes it is needed.

Some people’s idea of a safe place is putting in their favourite hidey-hole so their curious children can’t find it or just somewhere out of the way that important documents are kept.

There are some important issues to think about here:

• is your Will going to be in a usable condition when the time comes?;

• if you were killed in a house fire would your Will be destroyed in the same fire or seriously damaged by water used to in the fire-fighting efforts?;

• will your executors know where to find it and will they be able to have access to it?

Many otherwise valid Wills are never found by the executors or are destroyed in fires. Sometimes they are even destroyed by rodents.

So the only satisfactory answer is to keep it somewhere really safe and where your executors can get their hands on it when they need to. This really should be done or the effort you put into making your Will may be in vain. It proves to be for many people unfortunately.

There are many different safe storage options that can be considered:

• home ‘fire rated’ safes and professional storage facilities e.g. a solicitor’s office (but not a realistic option perhaps if you have done a DIY Will);
• bank safe-deposit boxes but this method is deprecated as they are difficult to access by non-signatories to the account (this is an example of being in a safe and secure storage area but inaccessible);
• the Probate Registry (fee payable);
• organisations that special in ‘super-safe’ Will storage for a fee used by many Will writing companies and other businesses to store important documents.

The last option can be very useful as the executors and the testator are the only people who have access to it and is particularly useful for executors at a distance as postal access is normally available.

For more information about DIY Wills visit http://diy-will.co.uk but in the meantime start owning the idea that safe secure Will storage is just as important as writing your Will in the first place.