Important Roles in Wills
If you are thinking about your will, thinking about doing one, thinking about amending one, the main three important roles that I want you to think about are executors, trustees, and guardians.
One of the main reasons I want young people to do their wills is so they can name a guardian for their children. One of the vital things in your will is to name a guardian for your children. I often hear from younger people that they don’t own much, so what’s the point in doing a will? However, if you have kids, it’s worth putting your wishes down in writing. You can choose who will look after them in the event that something happens to you—and make sure you appoint an alternate just in case your first choice is unable to do it.
It’s very important to name guardians in your will. For example, if you’re a grandparent and you know that your children haven’t done their will, maybe you should get them to do it. Guardians are appointed to look after young children when their parents die, so it makes sense to make sure they’ve thought about this before it happens.
It’s one of the main reasons I specialise in this area because early in my career, I encountered a case where a young couple had died in a hit-and-run accident and their young children were being fought over by their respective grandparents. And this fight lasted for a couple of years, during which time the children were not cared for and were deprived of financial resources. So you can avoid this situation by making it clear who will care for your children after you die and who will manage your estate.
The three people responsible for doing these things are executors, trustees, and guardians.
An executor is named in every will, because an executor takes care of all the details involved with carrying out your wishes regarding your estate after your death; a trustee manages property for minors or mentally incapacitated adults; and a guardian cares for minors until they reach adulthood or become mentally capable.
When choosing an executor for your estate, you need someone who knows a bit about your life, is fairly strong administratively and can communicate well with others so that beneficiaries know what’s going on. Such an executor can then help control the process and make sure everyone is happy with how things are going. An executor’s role could be a fairly short sort of role if the administration of the estate only takes six to 12 months, but if it’s longer than that, then your executors become your trustees and they look after those funds until your children are old enough to receive them.
So it just makes it even more important to think about who your executors are because they end up becoming trustees as well. You can potentially appoint additional trustees if there are certain scenarios that happen, but it’s usually the executors that just transition into a trustee, period. They administer the estate and then they hold the funds, invest them until the children are old enough to be able to take those funds themselves.
These are your three roles that you really need to be thinking about. A lot of people come in to do their will, and they’ve really only thought about beneficiaries. They haven’t necessarily thought about these three roles, but these are the most important roles. The beneficiaries, in some way, should work themselves out because you have certain obligations to family members, but it is more important to think about who looks after the kids, if you have them and who looks after the administration of the estate and makes sure your will is followed through. And if there are trusts, who ends up running those trusts until the beneficiaries can take their own inheritance.
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