Components Of A Will – Monetary Legacies
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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.
If you wish to leave a sum of money to a friend or relative, this is known as a pecuniary legacy. You can express this simply: ‘I give the sum of £3,000 to my friend Paul Smith.
You may wish to add a few words to express the reason for the gift, e.g. ‘in recognition of his kindness to me during my lifetime.Perhaps you have been a member of a social club and wish the members to hold an event in memory of your times together.
In those circumstances say, ‘I give the sum of £3,000 to the Any town Thursday Social Club with the request that they hold a dinner for the members in my memory.’ It is of great assistance to your executors to add the full address of your friend or the organiser of your social club.
If you wish to leave a pecuniary legacy to a child, special rules apply. If the child is very young, you will be faced with the problem that he cannot give a valid receipt to the executors.
The law says that a child under 18 cannot give a receipt for a legacy. To get round this, you may specify that the executors may accept a receipt from his parents or you may specify that he does not receive the money until he is 18 or older.
Unless a pecuniary legacy is given to your own child or is expressed to be for the child’s immediate maintenance, it does not carry interest.
Let us say you leave £5,000 to your nephew on attaining the age of 18 years. He is six when you die. He cannot have the £5,000 until he is 18 but he cannot have any interest gained from investing it either (which belongs to the residuary beneficiary).
When he is 18 he will receive £5,000 and nothing more. The way round this is to specify that the gift is to carry the intermediate income.
Want to read more about this – Components Of A Will – More On Gifts In A Will or Components Of A Will – Demonstrative Legacies
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