I am retired now, but was the director of a Will Writing company and in the course of my career wrote about 6,500 Wills from everyone from single mums on benefits to multimillionaires.
I'm not going to give anyone specific advice (I am on my retirement insurance so I can't and besides my CPD is out of date), but I am a bit alarmed by some of the things people are saying here. In particular:
I had my first will done, by a will writing company (this choice was against my better judgement but I was over-ruled). To be fair, what was done, and the fee, was OK for what it was, but it was clear fairly quickly that I (totally a lay person who'd once read a book) knew more about wills than the will writing person. Though in fairness
it was OK there is no way they'd cope with anything not 100% simple.
In the course of my career, I met a lot of people who shared your belief that reading a book is going to qualify you to write your Will. My former industry makes an astonishing amount of money fixing the mistakes of people like you. Contentious probate is far more valuable to the industry than Wills.
The main problem with DIY Wills is of there is a problem with the validity of your Will and you've written it yourself, you will never know whether it has been done correctly or not, because you won't be alive to see it proved.
Rest assured your kids will find out if you made a mistake. A significant number of homemade Wills fail, mostly because of incorrect execution.
1 If the new will, the one that was acted upon, says something like "I revoke all previous wills", the old will was revoked and all is well. It is standard practice to always do this. Without this I think there may be some argument that both are valid, which presents problems if they contradict. You should always destroy all wills if you make a new one to really make sure. As executor it is not for you to destroy (unrevoked) old wills, and you could be on a sticky wicket if you did so, or did not properly take into account the old will, assuming you were aware of if at the time. If the later one had the "revoke previous", clause then all is well.
You can only ever have one Will. When you execute a new one, the old one is revoked. That is the reason it is called a Last Will and Testament.
A quick call to the bank and/or Land registry will tell you what to do and how. Like you say everything transferred to you, just needs registration
It won't. The law around property ownership is extremely complicated. You can make an awful mess of things like this if you aren't careful. Again, the legal industy LOVES people that DIY stuff like this.
The case illustrates that you cannot just exclude eg a child from a Will and expect it to be non-contestible.
Seems to be a (worrying) minefield tbh.
Well, the law is contradictory. The Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 2005 says that children (or indeed, anyone you've regularly been supporting financially) has a right to inherit some of your estate, but it also says that it is fair that the inheritance received can be nothing. You can put anything you want in a Will.
If you exclude somebody from a Will, they normally appoint a solicitor who will send what is called a "Larke v Nugus letter" to whoever wrote their Will. I get them occasionally. I have to pull someone's case notes up and send them along with the Will to explain why the Will is the way it is. I've never had a Will challenged, because my notes protect the beneficiaries chosen by the testator. The letter explaining the situation is a common first line of defence as writing the reasons someone isn't to inherit in a Will would be considered "scandalous" which could lead to the part of the Will where someone was excluded being removed from the Will before probate is granted.
To be able to give proper advice about this, please don't rely on what random people tell you on the Internet.
There is much more to giving legal advice than having read a book about Wills and reading things on the Internet.
Unions can be OK, but the options on offer can be fairly limited and my professional experience is when you explain what people can do in a Will they often make a different choice to the one they thought they were going to make.
My advice to OP is to make an appointment with a professional. A solicitor might be a good choice, but the pricing can be rather opaque. Willwriters are usually better value because they normally do fixed fees. Find a qualified one.
www.ipw.org.uk is a good place to start.
