For some people, will writing is easy. Depending on the way your family operates, it may be a simple case of dividing your estate between your children and calling it a day. Alternatively, you may simply wish to leave everything to your spouse or partner.
Then again, it’s all too easy to assume that every family will operate the same way – and that, if you’re starting to feel as though it would be better (and even fairer) to leave varying amounts of your estate to your children, it can be tough to find any impartial guidance on the subject.
Here’s what you need to know.
Reasons for
The most obvious reason in favour of leaving the same amount to your children is fairness. In life, we want to ensure our children feel equally loved and cared for, and, for many parents, ensuring complete fairness in the will is their final opportunity to demonstrate that they love their children the same.
Of course, leaving slightly more or less to one child needn’t mean that they aren’t just as loved as another of your children – but more on that below.
The other major advantage to leaving an equal inheritance to each of your children is it naturally circumvents the risk of one or more of your beneficiaries enlisting the help of a will dispute lawyer to take the case to court. While the more obvious reasons for contesting a will tend to be a lack of testamentary capacity or something more sinister like fraud or undue influence, it’s also the case that a will can be contested (at times, successfully) for a lack of fairness.
The best way to avoid this is to provide sound, logical reasonings for your decisions. It needn’t be the case that reducing one or more of your children’s inheritances will lead to a court battle.
Finally, leaving the same amount to each child avoids passing on a sense of resentment to the beneficiaries involved. If you aren’t around to explain yourself, they could feel tortured by the decision for the rest of their lives. It may even cause irreparable rifts between your children.
The Cons
In plenty of cases, it’s true that one child deserves more than another. One obvious instance of this arises when one child elects to care for their parent through illness or old age. It may not be that the child who doesn’t offer that care deserves to have their inheritance reduced, but that the child who does offer that care simply deserves to be given extra. If they have sacrificed time and money and taken on the emotional upheaval of acting as long-term carers, then there is every reason to leave them more.
Alternatively, a child may have distanced themselves from the family to such a degree that you feel they do not hold such a claim to your estate. This is a very personal decision to make, and it’s hard to put a monetary value on absenteeism, so it’s best to talk things through with your solicitor before you make your final decision.
