Making a will is a task many people delay, often because it feels like something to deal with another day. When the decision is finally made, a DIY will kit or online template can seem like a straightforward and low-cost solution.
However, a will is a legal document, and even a small error in how it is written or executed can have significant consequences. It may mean your estate is not distributed as you intended, or that the will is invalid altogether.
Before writing your own will, it is worth understanding where the real risks lie. The risks generally fall into three areas, including whether the will is legally valid, whether it is drafted and executed correctly, and whether it actually saves money in the long run.
Yes. Will writing is not a regulated activity in the UK, so there is no legal requirement to use a solicitor. This is why people often ask whether you can do your own will, or whether you can write a will yourself. Legally, you can, but the more important question is whether it will hold up and achieve what you intend when it is needed.
A DIY will can be perfectly valid, but only if it meets the formal legal requirements. To be valid in England and Wales, a will must:
If you miss any of these steps then the will can be declared invalid. If that happens, your estate is distributed under the rules of intestacy, a fixed order set out in law that decides who inherits regardless of what you actually wanted.
A DIY will can be legal, and self made wills are not prohibited under UK law, but that doesn’t mean they are reliable. The difficulty with self made wills is rarely the idea behind them, but the execution. A template cannot ask follow-up questions, identify a contradiction in your instructions, or recognise that your circumstances need more than a standard clause whereas a solicitor can.
The most common problems with DIY wills include:
Of these, witnessing errors are one of the most common reasons a will, or part of it, fails. Once the person has died, that kind of error can no longer be corrected. Even Martin Lewis and MoneySavingExpert have warned that DIY kits carry this same risk of errors that only surface once it is too late to fix them.
DIY wills tend to work best for very simple estates, with no property, no business interests and no complicated family situations. This is often why DIY wills don’t work for most people. Second marriages, stepchildren, jointly owned homes, inheritance tax planning and family members who might contest a will are all common, and none of these are well served by a generic template.
A DIY will kit can cost as little as £10, which understandably looks like an appealing saving compared with instructing a solicitor.
However, that saving only holds if the will works as intended. If a mistake means part or all of the will fails, the cost of resolving it can far exceed the initial saving. This might include an inheritance dispute between beneficiaries, a claim against the estate, or assets being distributed under the rules of intestacy. The upfront cost of a DIY kit does not reflect the total cost if something goes wrong.
A will only has to work once, and it has to work at exactly the moment you are not there to explain what you meant. That is why it is worth having it drafted properly from the outset, rather than finding out too late that a witness was not eligible to act as one, a clause was ambiguous, or a jointly owned asset was never accounted for.
At GSB, we take the time to ask the questions a template cannot. If you would like your will drafted properly and reviewed by someone who knows what to look for, get in touch with our team.
