Making The Beneficiaries Jump Through Hoops – Common Conditions
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Want to make a start on your will?
Making a Will is not about wealth it is about making sure that what you want to happen to your estate does happen. It gives you the opportunity to specify such things as who will administer your estate, who will care for your children and who will receive specific items of your property.
Leaving aside situations where you wish to try and separate your beneficiaries from their spouses or their faith, there are generally three main situations in which you may wish to impose conditions. These are:
1. Where you are worried that your spouse will remarry after your death and disinherit your children.
2. Where you wish a named person to take care of your pets or perform some similar service after your death.
3. Where you wish to offer a beneficiary the chance to buy something from your estate (although, strictly speaking, this is an option not a condition).
Your spouse
It is perfectly acceptable to limit your widow’s interest in the estate to her widowhood. You may also wish to specify that she loses her interest in the estate if she enters into permanent cohabitation with another man. However, determining exactly when such a situation has arisen may be trickier to decide.
Your executors may find themselves with an awkward situation on their hands and some embarrassing questions to ask. Remember that if your wife’s interest is to end on remarriage, the money must then go somewhere else. This raises the issue of a trust and anything other than the most basic arrangement will require professional drafting.
If you intend to leave your estate to your wife for life with a gift over to your children, you may well need professional executors; certainly you will need people who are not beneficiaries. This is to prevent conflicts of interest arising.As a general principle of trust law, trustees must maintain a balance between the interests of beneficiaries. Investing for income for the widow at the same time as preserving the capital against erosion by inflationary pressures requires a careful approach.
There is no legal bar to a beneficiary being a trustee but it will often lead to arguments.