With a valid Will you can make sure Aunt Susie’s 180 year old Russian vase goes to your favorite person, rather than a yard sale. A valid Will makes sure those stocks (at least the ones still worth something) are used to pay your kids’ tuition instead of your spendthrift brother. It makes sure your house goes to your widow instead of being divided up among the siblings you haven’t spoken to in 20 years.

The point is that with a Will you are in control. Without a Will, distribution of what you can’t take with you is determined by state law. These are called Intestacy laws. If you die with a Will, you are said to have died Testate. If you die without a Will, you are said to have died Intestate. Strange words, but not having a Will can mean big problems, expenses and broken family relationships. I know. I’ve seen it happen more than once. I even knew a brother and sister who fought for weeks over a Mickey Mouse cookie jar. It wasn’t pretty. Neither was the cookie jar.

Let’s take a simple example of Intestate Succession in Pennsylvania under current law. Assume you die leaving a spouse and two children. Your surviving spouse gets the first $30,000.00 plus one-half of the balance of your estate. The surviving children get to split the remaining half. Now this may be well and good, but the share left to your children is taxable under state law. If you had a Will and the Will left everything to your surviving spouse, the whole estate would have been passed to the spouse tax free under state law. What if your spouse needed the entire estate to keep the family safe and sound? This can get very complicated when the person leaves no spouse or no children. You see the siblings, cousins and uncles and aunts come out of the woodwork.

Having a Will prepared is neither especially complicated nor expensive. Yet the time, money and aggravation it will save your survivors is worth a fortune. Click on to the Wills and Estates section of my website for more information.