Page 37 - Book10E

CHAPTER 4
Avoiding Common Mistakes and
Problems in Your Will
As explained by AllBusiness (www.allbusiness.com), your will can be either very simple or quite complicated, depending on your personal and family situation and your estate’s value. But whether simple or complicated, you can still make several mistakes in your will. Here are a few of the big ones.
Forgetting to review your will annually
There are many different reasons why you would want to update your will, such as getting married, getting divorced, or having a major change in your financial fortunes. Unless you review your will at least once a year, you run a high risk of having an out-of-date will when you die. So pick a date, any date, that you set aside each year to review your will to see if you need to make any updates to the document.
Forgetting to include a residuary ("leftovers") clause
Your will’s residuary clause can either cover the “leftovers” of your estate (if you want to be very clear in your will about who will get what property), or it can actually be the main clause you use if you just want to treat most or all of your estate as one big pool to be divided up among your main beneficiaries.
Regardless of your strategy, if you forget to include a residuary clause to cover property that you don’t specifically mention elsewhere in your
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