On Feb 12, 7:35 am, tom...@hotmail.com wrote:
> Has anyone used the following website website [omitted].
> It provides online wills. The site has many online e-books and looks
> very professional. It appears very professional and offers a extensive
> free will and estate planning guide which is very professionally.
What is your relationship to the site you mention? Are you spamming for them? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt but the wording of your post sounds like it came straight off the site's promotional materials.
> Any suggestions on online will providers??
The main suggestion I have for using them is, beware of what you ask for, since you might get it. Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice (Mickey in Fantasia, for those who don't know the classical allusion) you will know enough (with the help of the site) to create a legally binding will, but you will have no idea how to turn it off -- i.e. what will come out at the other end, after you die. And by then, it will be too late to change. You may wind up disinheriting (in whole or in part) a person you wanted to especially benefit, or seeing (as you look down from Heaven, or the other place) the bulk of your estate going to a despised relative you wanted to get nothing. And other things may happen before you die as to which, in the absence of your (or your lawyer's) having enough foresight to include clauses in your Will to deal with all those eventualities, the law will have to "plug in" its presumptions about what the _average_ Testator (the person making the Will) would have wanted (i.e. apply the local "Intestacy Laws"). This may or may not give the result YOU wanted.
Only a trained professional can take the facts of your situation, and your desired outcome, and tell you with confidence how to get from point A to point B while avoiding C. And getting a will drafted by an actual lawyer is usually one of the least expensive kinds of legal services; many lawyers even offer it as kind of a "loss leader" in terms of the actual time and effort they put into it for you, in hopes that, once you have an established relationship, you may come back to them with other legal needs, at least when it is time to probate the Will. Of course, you have no such obligation, but you get the benefit of the low initial price.
I'd be very interested to hear from anybody whose now-deceased ancestors actually used a "canned" will of some kind (online or from a book; those kind of self-help books have been around for decades) in a situation where some unexpected twist occurred and the Will contained provisions that handled it with aplomb when it was finally probated. My guess is most of them wound up with a large heap of anguish before sorting it all out, if anything other than a simple and straight "All to my dear wife" or "All to my children" was what was written, and what actually happened. If you draft a simple Will with no "what if" provisions, you would be taking a big risk that nobody crucial would die unexpectedly before Testator did, that the intestacy laws wouldn't change (or the Testator wouldn't move to a state with different laws), and that the result of application of those laws would match your actual expectations about final distribution of your Estate.
Secondly, there is a lot more to proper estate planning than just drafting a Will. Unless you are so impecuniouis that you frankly don't even really need a Will, you will need to consider tax consequences, Medicaid and long-term-care, as well as end-of-life medical issues. Or you may want to set up a living trust for your grandchildren if your adult children are ne'er-do-wells or just for the tax benefits. A good trusts-and-estates lawyer can look at your whole situation and recommend the best solution, or several good solutions for you to pick from. Otherwise, doing your own Will is a lot like going to the pharmacy (in the land of do-it-yourself medicine, no Rx required) and picking the powerful drugs that you think will cure what you think you have, based on what you read in the Handy Pocket Family Medical Guide. You may wind up poisoning yourself instead, or beingcrippled or killed by the illness that you tried unsuccessfully to treat. Would you take out your own appendix?
--
This posting is for discussion purposes, not professional advice.
Anything you post on this Newsgroup is public information.
I am not your lawyer, and you are not my client in any specific legal
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For confidential professional advice, consult your own lawyer in a
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Mike Jacobs
LAW OFFICE OF W. MICHAEL JACOBS
10440 Little Patuxent Pkwy #300
Columbia, MD 21044
(tel) 410-740-5685 (fax) 410-740-4300
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