IF I HAVE A WILL, MY FAMILY WILL AVOID PROBATE
I am unsure how this mistaken belief ever came about since a Will is almost synonymous with probate.
By way of background, using a Will as your primary estate planning document, your estate may be probated. Without a Will, your estate will still go through the probate process, but the state laws of intestacy, discussed before in this blog, are applied to your estate and possibly overcome your wishes.
Probate is a court supervised proceeding, where your Will is “proven” in court. If the Will is proven to be valid, then title on your assets, after payment of your debts and expenses, can be legally transferred to your heirs according to your wishes. Since this is a court supervised process, it is also a public process, meaning the full details of your Will are public and available to anyone wishing to view the court records. This includes the information about who your heirs are, where they live, and often the assets of the estate.
As if the public airing of your final wishes and disposition of your assets is not bad enough, notices must be sent out to all parties with an interest in your Will, usually to all family members, to your creditors, and public notices of your death must be posted. This is to notify and allow anyone who may have a claim against your estate the time to file that claim and have it included in the probate process.
Further, for those individuals with property in more than one state, upon death there will not only be a probate process in the state of residence, but also the need for what is known as an “ancillary probate” in each of the other states where property is owned.
Because of this, most people would choose to avoid probate if they could. Why would anyone voluntarily choose to allow their estate to be probated? There are other methods to use, such as using a living trust as your primary estate planning document instead of a Will, which can avoid most of the time, expense and publicity associated with the probating of a Will.
In short, using a Will as your primary estate planning tool will not keep you, or rather your heirs, out of probate. It does mean however, that your probate will likely be more organized than it otherwise would have been had you died without a Will.
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