A Will is your only voice when you pass. It powerfully tells the world exactly how you want your Assets distributed when your gone. It then ensures this is carried out appropriately.
Without a Will your Assets will pass down to family, but the process is made all that more difficult and who gets what can often lead to unintended battles between family members. While you might think now that this would never happen with my family, you could well be right and we hope you are. However, if everyone entitled to make a claim on your Estate cannot agree, then the only alternative is the Court. This can quite quickly erode the value of the Estate and the nature of litigation can divide families who were previously united.
Your Will can leave all of your Assets to different individuals in shares. These distributions in shares can then cascade down to their immediate family members upon them predeceasing you. Alternatively, the predeceased persons share can revert back to increase the pool proportionally with those remaining with a share. Special bequests are also common to ensure that specific people get specific things. While these are the most common methods of distributing your Assets, various other options exist, such as opening a Trust Account for certain and future beneficiaries and including charities.
Your superannuation is separated from your Estate. There are Non Binding and Binding Nominations. Binding Nominations must be updated every three years. However, it ensures that the proportions go to those nominated as Binding Nominees. It is binding. A Non Binding Nomination will leave it up to the Trustee of the Super Fund to decide if the distributions are appropriate. The Trustee must give consideration to any Dependents of you before it considers the Non Binding Nominees. This might be OK in certain circumstances and not in others. The Trustee will also decide on the proportions, which you may or may not disagree with. For example if there are 3 children, 12, 15 and 20. Te 20 year old may not receive anything or a small proportion because the younger children are deemed as being dependents.
If you are reading this then you are probably considering a Will or want to update your current Will. Good move, they say it is best to hope for the best and plan for the worst. Well this is the one thing that definitely has to be planned. Come in and see us so that we can help you work through all of your options. We can draft up the will and make it legally sound and are quite prepared to keep the original safe in our Deeds Register.