WILL and Estate Planning – How To Pass On Your Legacy To Your Loved Ones

Team HF

Happynessfactory.in is a world class goal based online financial planning platform that brings a personal financial coach to every family helping them save and invest wisely.

24 Sep, 2018

All of us dream of a happy retired life and spend substantial time to plan our finances around it. While this is important – and we have covered it extensively in our posts Is Your Retirement Corpus Enough? and How To Make Your Money Last A Lifetime, passing on our Assets to our loved ones – be it Investments, Properties or even our Business, deserves our equal attention.

At Happyness Factory while we have been helping hundreds of retirees plan and invest their money to ensure that they lead a great retired life, we emphasize and advise them to prioritize Estate Planning too.

Simplifying and organizing your documentation and paperwork along with WILL and Estate Planning will ensure your children can benefit from your wealth in your absence and there are no family disputes. Most people don’t create WILLs because they think it’s a difficult process. In reality, with the right help and information, preparing a WILL is an easy process. Let’s understand how to create a WILL –

In addition to following the above process, keep in mind these Key Pointers while making a WILL –

• A simple paper mentioning all your assets and what goes to whom also constitutes as a WILL. In such cases, you must keep the WILL in a locker and keep your loved ones informed about the presence of a WILL.
• A separate WILL should be prepared for you and your spouse.
• Be careful not to include your ancestral property in your WILL. Right to inherited property is acquired by birth.
• Don’t confuse Nominee with Beneficiary. Nominee in investments is just a caretaker. The Real Owner is decided as per the WILL. Actual distribution happens based on WILL or in absence of WILL, to the legal heirs, under the law. Prefer to keep the nominee same as the beneficiary in the WILL.
• Whenever the WILL is revised, explicitly mention that all the WILLs before this date are void.

Suze Orman, an Author and Financial Advisor most appropriately said “Estate planning is an important and everlasting gift you can give your family. And setting up a smooth inheritance isn’t as hard as you might think”.