The importance of working with a wills lawyer: beyond online solutions
In today's digital age, convenience and accessibility have led many people to seek online solutions for various needs, including creating a will. However, when it comes to planning for the future and ensuring the smooth transfer of your wealth and legacy to the next generation, it is crucial to work with an expert wills lawyer. This blog post explores why the expertise, legal advice, and strategic guidance provided by a lawyer are essential for creating a reliable estate plan that offers great value.
To adequately address this important topic, I will be dividing the blog post into two parts.
Part 1: Strategy advice
Your estate plan is more than just the final words on the page that you sign. Delivering legal strategy advice requires meeting with a lawyer one-on-one, at least once. While a "lawyer-approved" will template may be appealing, it is of no use unless a lawyer meets with you to:
1. Identify your objectives.
2. Understand your circumstances, including your family members and assets.
Legal strategy involves using this information to design a plan that achieves your desired outcome with certainty. Without this meeting, there is no guarantee that the decisions made in the template (or the template itself) will work for your specific circumstances.
Here are a few examples where clients' estate plans would have encountered expensive problems without strategy advice:
Nominating an executor or trustee who resides overseas. Naming a sole executor or trustee who is not an Australian resident for tax purposes can lead to significant negative tax consequences. We frequently encounter this situation, which would not be identified by a will kit or an online wills service.
Gifting assets that are not part of your estate and cannot be gifted through a will. Did you know that not all assets can be gifted this way? Assets such as jointly held property, shares, and bank accounts automatically become the sole property of the survivor. While there are ways to include them in your estate, we need to discuss the advantages and disadvantages.
Lack of understanding about what happens to your superannuation (super) when you die. Super is not automatically considered an asset of your estate. Decisions regarding whether to include it or keep it outside your estate (using a BDBN) should only be made with legal or financial advice, as there are significant tax consequences associated with making the wrong choice. For example, bringing super into an estate without using a Super Proceeds Trust can mean that payment is taxed between 15-30%. A seriously costly mistake!
A similar trap for clients is nominating someone not approved as a dependent by the SIS Act (which applies to superannuation) and thus the nomination not being recognised on death, causing lengthy delays in payment being made and opening the funds up to being fought over.
Estate planning law fascinates me because it intersects with various other areas of law, making it an engaging field. An expert wills lawyer possesses knowledge about family law, property law, commercial law, intellectual property, superannuation, and more. They can apply relevant case law to navigate how these areas interact with a person's death.
If it were possible for me to deliver a high-quality product to the public without offering legal strategy advice, I would sell an online will template and make a lot more money!
However, my experience has shown that these documents are often not worth the paper they are written on. I have worked with too many grieving families who faced limited access to estate funds (sometimes locked, frozen in the estate due to legal complications.) Therefore, I cannot, in good conscience, produce and sell a will kit or offer a solely online solution to my clients.
You and your loved ones deserve so much better. You may only fully appreciate this when facing your own loss or when your family confront your passing.
To be continued in Part 2.