The Money Doctor John Lowe has a series of will templates depending on your status e.g. single person with no kids or married with adult kids.
I have not seen them so I don't know how good or bad they are.
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But they are definitely better than no will.
Brendan
In some limited circumstances no will is the correct decision.
For example, if you are female, widowed\single and wish to divide your estate equally between your children with no additional stipulations, then the additional (admittedly tiny) risk of a will brings no real added benefit.
If you are reasonably happy to allow your estate be shared equally between your children and are very concerned that they will fight with each other, then trading off one issue against another, you might decide that making no will creates one less battle front.
As a practising solicitor, I am ambivalent about DIY wills.
I certainly cannot recommend the option, but if someone takes this option without discussing it with me at all, well actually that is not such a bad outcome.
For rural solicitors, the top of the market rate for a pair of wills is circa €350+VAT. If the solicitor is doing a comprehensive job on anything other than the most straightforward situation, this is marginally profitable at best. Most wills are prepared at a loss for my business., and I expect that most rural solicitors have the same issue. It is getting harder to make a business case for doing this work.
Why does this happen? There are multiple reasons. The main one is that as soon as someone consults a solicitor at all about a will, the solicitor is at risk if he or she is later seen to have delayed in preparing that will or making progress with instructions. If a will does not get made, disgruntled beneficiaries who might otherwise have benefitted, can sue the solicitor. It's a minefield.
You can protect yourself with a bulletproof file-closing or non-engagement letter, but that takes time too (for which you definitely won't get paid), so you might as well issue an engagement letter, do the work and get paid at least something. That seems to be the logic.
Also, it seems to me that many solicitors are unduly attached to the perceived 'security blanket' of having a safe full of wills.
However, giving away money for the mere possibility of profitable probate work in 20 or 30 years time (when your clients die) is not an objectively sound business strategy. Every job taken on should at a minimum pay its own way.
For solicitors, probate of DIY wills is a little bit like clients calling in after they have already bought a property at auction: it may well turn out to be fine, but if it isn't, the solicitor has the comfort of knowing that he\she had no hand in creating the problems and can charge handsomely for resolving them.
If DIY wills were very prevalent, DIY probates would also be more common. So, possibly less business all round for the legal profession.
However, this would also mean that when people were unable to manage a DIY probate, it would be because there was sufficient complexity and difficulty to make the services of a solicitor essential - -so the DIY wills that end up going to a solicitor for Probate should yield, on average, more complex and more profitable work for the solicitor.
Fewer probate practitioners, possibly less work to do overall, but that work being inherently more profitable for those solicitors:- not necessarily a bad thing. The legal profession should not be scared of such a trend (if it were to become a trend).
