Leave a legacy in your will

”Hi. My name is Martha Swann. I’m an associate solicitor at Wilson Solicitors. The majority of my work is dealing with estate administration and also drafting wills and powers of attorney for clients. The benefits of making legacies in your will, I’d say the main benefit would be that it’s legally binding if it’s in a legally valid will. So you know that your executors are bound to make those gifts on your behalf.

I’m just finishing an estate at the moment actually, the whole estate went to a number of Christian charities.The majority of them were really small charities. And although in the grand scheme of things, the legacies that they received probably weren’t that big, for those charities, they would make an enormous difference.

So it’s worth having a think about who you’d really like to benefit. And like I say, the smaller the charity, the bigger the change that could be made by a legacy being left in a well. If you are going to make a new will or update a will, make sure that you’re going to see somebody maybe just to check that the wording is correct. We have a number of cases where homemade wills have crossed our desk and the names of the charities haven’t been as clear. And so you spend a lot of time dealing with going backwards and forwards to try and establish who the charities are.

For example, if you just said, I want this to go to lung cancer research, like towards that particular, not a specific charity, but towards that particular charitable aim. It’s not very clear to the executors where that should go.
So I think it’s really important just to check that your will is valid and your wishes are clear enough to make sure that the legacies that you do want to make actually do make it to the charities you want to benefit.”

Martha Swann