Everyone wants to rest in peace when God put them to rest. However, more often than not, we will make some kind of mistake when we set up our will and estate one way or the other. We might lie sleep and sound inside the coffin, but our kids and grandkids will be fighting over what we carelessly ignored when we were alive and suffer from our mistakes.
To prevent that, we will need to pay attention to the way we set up our will with the help of experienced wills and estate lawyers.
When we state a specific investment or item we want to appoint to a specific beneficiary under our will, we have to make sure we check once in a while to keep ourselves updated on the item’s potential for appreciation/depreciation within a certain period. This helps us adjust our will accordingly instead of leaving a big blob of outdated mess to our loved ones who will suffer directly from it.
If I stated on my will that I want to leave the current 16Gb USB drive to my great-grandson with my estimated decease time being 200 years from now (despite our constantly upgrading biotechnology with plenty of room for life expectancy improvement). For this, you will have to check every 5-7 years to see how much is worth. This is because it will be well worth a lot more than what is it’s worth now. Therefore, every 5-7 year, you will have to change the estimated price of your USB from $5 to $8.50 and from $8.5 to $14.99 accordingly.
Secondly, the unfortunate fact is there should always be a legal process involved closely tied with court orders that might be carried out against your will. Hence, it is recommended to set up your will/estate without taking consideration of the beneficiary’s personality and his/her potential behaviors after you pass away. For example, all the young people love to live in big cities with nightclubs and highrises these days. If I want to leave my house in the small town of Bakersfield to my two sons and I state on my will that they can only sell my house after both of them can afford to own their own house in Bakersfield. If one of my sons move to Hawaii and refuses to come back to Bakersfield and does not want to own a house in Bakersfield. This will become an extremely long legal process to finally allow my two sons to sell the house because it’s legally against my will. The house might worth less than half of the price which they will be allowed to sell, compare to its price right after I pass away due to the increasingly crowded homeless area population migrating into the household I left them within a matter of months after I pass away. So I passively made both of my sons suffer.
Lastly and most importantly, the residuary clause should always be taken into great consideration by anyone who is contemplating setting up his/her will and estate. None of us know what’s gonna happen until the very end. If there is any item, he/she didn’t put down specifically for his/her list of beneficiaries as for the items he/she might never even know he/she own. In such cases, the residuary clause will be activated immediately upon his/her death so that all the items he/she didn’t list will be distributed based on the residuary clause. The deceased might inherit two goldmines from his/her Virginian great grandparents previously died back in the 80s and never knew about it. Everything is possible, and thus should be taken care of beforehand.
