While writing a will may not be the first thing on your mind when you start your career, it makes a lot of sense to have one. In any good list of money management tips you will come across, one item will probably be writing a will. Read on to see a few reasons why you need to write your will if you haven’t already.
You Have Children
This is the biggest motivation for most people to write a will. That being said, about 50-60% of Americans currently don’t have a will. You don’t need to wait until you start having children to write a will, however, because at this time you will probably be very distracted and occupied with more pressing matters.
If you plan on having children at some point, know that having a will will make things easy and help them to avoid undergoing court probates and spending a lot of time in courts or with lawyers if something were to happen to you. If you want to include a few checks and balances, you can identify a legal guardian and a financial custodian who will have different duties geared towards the welfare of your children.
You Want To Leave Your Assets to Friends or Charities
When someone passes on without a will, the courts will often automatically give your assets and money to your immediate family. If for some reason you want to leave the wealth and assets you accumulated to your friends and family, you need to state this in a will.
You Have Valuable Items
Over time, you may have accumulated some valuable items like paintings, rare works of art, and other valuable collections. It could even be a vintage car or motorcycle, like the very first bikes manufactured by Indian Motorcycle® when the company first started in 1895. Should you pass away, these will have to be claimed by your family through court probate. If you have someone you would much rather give ownership of the said items to, you should write it in a will.
It Is An Easy Process
While it carries a lot of importance, a will is an extremely easy document to draft and is one of the easiest money management tips you can enforce. A short online search will reveal plenty of templates that you can use, and a professional lawyer can draft one for you in under 30 minutes.
As long as you have an idea of what you want to include, you will be done with the process quite fast, so there is no need to keep putting it off. You can also change the terms of your will whenever necessary. Depending on your current situation or the state of your business and relationship with your family, you can draft a will to suit your unique situation.
Proper Disbursement
If you have accumulated a lot of assets over time or collected a lot of money, you can write in your will how you want it to be distributed amongst your beneficiaries. If you feel that a certain asset or specific sum will best be suited for a specific person, write it down in your will. Should you pass on, there will be no fights over specifics, as it is clearly written in your will. Households in the U.S. have about 300,000 things in them on average, and this is a large number of items, some of which are worthy of being inherited.
While you may feel as if it is too early or you are not ready to write a will, this could not be further from the truth. One of the best money management tips is to write a will. This way, if anything happens, you know that your family and loved ones will not have a hard time acquiring the assets you would like to leave to them.