Discounted Wills for Single Parents During January 2012

PRESS RELEASE

Single Parents Offered Discounted Wills

SINGLE parents are being offered the opportunity to have a heavily discounted will written to protect their children’s future.

The Society of Will Writers (SWW), the UK’s leading professional body for the will-writing industry, is once again hosting Single Parent Month throughout January.

Gail Church of Bicester Wills who is also Regional Director for the SWW Oxfordshire Region says
“ Research has shown that single parents are one of the most likely groups not to have a will and the SWW is keen to change this.  The SWW is offering single parents throughout the UK a chance to have their will written at a greatly reduced cost in the hope it will make them think about their children’s future and ensure, should anything happen to them, their children’s’ welfare is assured and that they would be entrusted to the person that they want to care for them, instead of leaving it to chance.”

SWW Director General, Brian McMillan, said: “As parents with young children most of us never think about dying but sadly not all parents live long enough to see their children grow up. For single parents particularly, a will is the most important thing you can do for your children to ensure that guardianship and trusts are put in place should the unthinkable happen before your child is 18.

Throughout the month of January, SWW members across the country will be offering to write a single parent’s will for a fixed fee of £35 regardless of circumstances.

The SWW has more than 1,700 members across the UK, all of whom are bound by the Society’s code of conduct and who carry professional indemnity insurance.

For further information about this initiative in the Oxfordshire area please contact the Gail Church on 01869 244329 or email gail@bicesterwills.co.uk

Property Ownership

Property Ownership
Geoff Boycott out for a Duck!!

Geoff Boycott hit the headlines for a very different reason other than cricket last month. He is suing lawyers for compensation over a property deal involving a house in the millionaires’ resort of Sandbanks, Dorset.
In 1996, he bought a house for his “friend and confidante” Anne Wyatt.  Mr Boycott told the court he allowed Mrs Wyatt to live in the house rent-free, for the course of her lifetime. They were listed on the deeds as joint tenants.
But when Mrs Wyatt died in 2009, aged 82, her half of the house went to her estate instead of to Mr Boycott. To Geoff’s “huge surprise”, he discovered that Mrs Wyatt had changed the agreement in 2007 to“tenants in common” so that she could leave her share of the property to her heirs.
Property ownership is always a difficult one for clients to understand many do not even know there are two different ways to own property and that if owned as joint tenants i.e. the property automatically goes to the survivor on death, it can easily be changed to tenants in common by a simple Deed of Variation without having to seek the permission of the other party.
Now Mr Boycott is seeking a sum equal to half the value of the house, he said he had never been advised that Mrs Wyatt could “sever” their agreement in such a way. “If I had known either one of us could do that, I wouldn’t have gone ahead,” he said.
He claimed that if lawyers had done their job properly when drawing up the original agreement, the property would have become his outright upon her death. Expressing his frustration with legal jargon, he said to Mr Justice Vos: “Us ordinary people are meant to get a fair deal from the law. How are ordinary people expected to understand when it’s double-Dutch like this?
He described the idea of joint tenancies as “ridiculous”.

This highlights the need for people to seek professional advice when wanting to bequeath property in their Will and to explore the implications of what they are doing.