5 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Making a Will

Over 60% of UK adults don't have a Will. Old news. What nobody talks about is how many of the Wills that do exist are basically broken. And I don't mean slightly imperfect. I mean genuinely, fight-in-court, wrong-people-get-the-house broken.

We've seen beneficiaries who died years ago still sitting in the document. An executor who quietly moved to New Zealand. Property sold in 2018 still referenced like the sale never happened. Clauses so badly worded that two solicitors would argue about them for months and both walk away thinking they were right.

Here's what gets me though. None of this surfaces until someone has died. You can't ring them up and ask what they actually meant. So the family argues about a single sentence. HMRC sends a tax bill that half an hour of planning would have killed off. Assets end up with the wrong people because the law stepped in and filled the gaps however it saw fit.

Every. Single. One of these is preventable. But you have to know where people trip up first.

This one drives me mad. People treat their Will like a task to tick off. Write it, file it, forget it. But a Will is supposed to reflect your life right now. Not five years ago when you sat down and wrote it.

Why this catches families out:

The law in England and Wales attaches brutal consequences to certain life events, and marriage is the one that floors people. Getting married completely cancels any Will you made before the wedding. Not partially. The whole thing. Gone. So if you wrote a Will at 25 and got married at 32, that document became worthless the second you said your vows. Nobody writes to you. No notification. It just... happens.

Divorce is a different animal. Your ex-spouse gets stripped from executor and beneficiary roles, fine, but the rest of the Will soldiers on. Sounds tidy on paper. The trouble is, if your ex was set to receive most of the estate, you're now looking at a document full of holes the remaining clauses were never designed to handle. It's like pulling a load-bearing wall out of a house and hoping the ceiling stays up.

Then children. A child born after the Will was signed does not magically appear in it. Same with grandchildren. Had a baby since you last looked at this? Unless you went back and changed things, that child may have no specific provision whatsoever. I've seen it happen and it is always ugly.

How to avoid it:

Set a reminder. Read through your Will every three years at minimum. After anything big (a wedding, a baby, a divorce, a death in the family, a significant change in your finances) go back to it straight away. Twenty minutes of reading. That's it. That's the difference between your wishes being honoured and your family spending years in legal proceedings.

When you die, someone has to deal with the admin. Applying for probate, chasing bank accounts, paying debts, distributing whatever is left. That person is your executor. And a bad choice here? Everything grinds to a halt.

Where people get this wrong:

They name someone who seems perfectly capable today but might not be in a decade. Your dad might be sharp and organised right now. But probate can drag on for months. Is he still going to have the energy for that in fifteen years? Worth thinking about. Actually, really worth thinking about, because most people don't.

Then there's the single-executor gamble. One person, no backup. If they die before you, or refuse the role, or emigrate, your family has to go to court and apply for an administrator. That takes time nobody has and costs money nobody planned for.

And look. Conflict is the real killer. Two executors who can't stand each other still have to agree on every decision throughout probate. Two siblings who haven't spoken properly since some falling out years ago? That estate is going absolutely nowhere. I've watched it play out more times than I can count, and it is always the same pattern.

Getting it right:

Two executors. That's the sweet spot for most families. They split the workload. One handles finances, the other deals with property. If one is ill or travelling, the other keeps things ticking over. Name a substitute as well, because the plan needs to hold up even if your first choices can't serve.

Also, and I cannot stress this enough, talk to them first. Ask them. A reluctant executor is honestly worse than not naming one at all.

For larger estates with business interests, overseas property, or a family where disputes are clearly brewing, a professional executor (a solicitor, typically) is worth every penny. They've done this hundreds of times and they won't get emotional about it.

Inheritance Tax. 40% on everything above the nil-rate band, which sits at 325,000 per person as of 2026. Married couples and civil partners can pool that, so 650,000 between them. Then there's the residence nil-rate band, up to 175,000 each (350,000 combined) when a qualifying home goes to children or grandchildren. Add it all up and the tax-free starting point is actually generous. Genuinely generous. More than most people realise.

So why do people still get caught?

Where things go wrong:

The biggest mistake, by far, is assuming you won't be affected. A three-bed house in the south-east. A couple of pension pots. Some savings. A life insurance payout that you forgot even counts. Add those up and a seemingly ordinary estate sails past the threshold. Happens all the time. And the family only finds out when HMRC sends the bill.

Gifts cause no end of confusion too. The "seven-year rule" sounds simple enough. Give something away, survive seven years, it leaves your estate for IHT purposes. But in practice there's taper relief, potentially exempt transfers, gifts with reservation of benefit. Each one has conditions and people get caught out by them constantly. I think the problem is that the seven-year rule sounds like the whole story. It's not even close.

Then there are reliefs that nobody claims because nobody knew they existed. Business Property Relief. Agricultural Property Relief. The 36% reduced IHT rate that kicks in when you leave at least 10% of your net estate to registered charities. All of these need particular wording in the Will. Miss the wording, miss the relief. Simple as that.

What you can do:

Think about tax from the start. Not as an afterthought. Work out roughly where your estate sits against the current thresholds. If you're getting close, trusts, charitable legacies, and structured lifetime giving can all chip away at the bill. If you're well over the line already, a specialist adviser will save your beneficiaries far more than their fee costs you. And that's not a sales pitch. That's just maths.

Ten years ago, nobody expected a Will to mention email passwords. That world is gone. Most of us have dozens of digital accounts now. Some worth real money. Others carrying sentimental value that rivals anything stuffed in a box in the attic. Probably exceeds it, actually.

Think about it. Email. Social media. Cloud storage packed with family photos. Online banking. Subscriptions. Cryptocurrency wallets. Websites you built. Digital businesses you run. All of it locked behind passwords that effectively die with you unless someone else knows how to get in.

The problems this creates:

Crypto is the starkest example. Not even a close runner-up. If you hold Bitcoin in a private wallet and die without sharing the recovery phrase, that money is gone. Not "lost somewhere" gone. Mathematically, permanently, irreversibly gone. There are billions of pounds worth of crypto worldwide that will never be recovered because the person who held the keys died without passing them on. Billions. Just sitting there on a blockchain, belonging to nobody.

Social media accounts sit in limbo unless someone contacts the platform to request memorialisation or deletion. Photos stored only in cloud services vanish when the subscription lapses. An online business with no handover plan just... stops. Revenue gone overnight. And nobody thought to write down the login.

What to do about it:

Start with a list. Go through every platform you use. Email, social media, banking apps, investment accounts, cloud photo storage, streaming, crypto exchanges, domains, websites. Write them all down.

One thing to be very careful about though. Do not put passwords directly in the Will. Wills become public documents after probate. That would be a security disaster. Keep login details in a password manager or a sealed envelope stored with your solicitor. Just make sure your executor knows where to find them.

More people are now adding a "digital executor" clause. Delete the dating profile. Memorialise the Facebook page. Transfer the crypto to a named beneficiary. Cancel the streaming services. The law around digital inheritance is still catching up, but writing your wishes down clearly gives your executor something to work with. Which is infinitely better than the alternative, which is guessing.

Will-writing kits from the stationery shop. Generic online templates. Some cost less than ten pounds. And look, for a small number of people with genuinely simple estates who also understand the legal requirements, they might get the job done.

For everyone else? False economy. I have strong feelings about this one. The problems these things store up can cost families vastly more than a properly drafted Will would have cost in the first place. And I mean vastly. Orders of magnitude more.

Why DIY Wills go wrong:

Ambiguous language. That's the number one culprit and it's not close. Professional drafters choose their words with obsessive care because vague phrasing breeds disputes. "I leave my money to my children." Sounds clear, right? Wrong. What counts as "money"? Bank balance, obviously. But what about the house? The investments? The car? Does "children" include stepchildren? What if one child predeceased you? A professional thinks through every one of these questions ahead of time. Someone filling in a template at the kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon usually doesn't. And why would they? They don't know what they don't know.

Witnessing errors are next. The rules here are strict and courts cannot overlook mistakes, no matter how sympathetic the circumstances. You need two independent adult witnesses, both present at the same time, both watching you sign. If a witness is also a beneficiary, they lose their inheritance. If a witness wasn't physically in the room when you signed, their attestation is void. I've seen Wills thrown out over this. Perfectly reasonable wishes, perfectly clear language, and the whole thing collapsed because a witness was in the kitchen making tea when the signature went down.

People also forget that marriage wipes out a previous Will entirely. Or that divorce punches holes in it that need patching up. Both of these trip up DIY Will-makers constantly.

And then there's the residuary clause trap. The residuary estate is the catch-all for anything not specifically given away elsewhere. Leave it out, and any assets you forgot to mention (or bought after writing the Will) drop into intestacy rules. Even though you have a Will covering everything else. Bizarre outcome. Happens more often than you'd think.

When DIY might work:

Genuinely simple situation. Single. Renting. Modest savings. No children. No business interests. Nothing overseas. And you properly understand the signing requirements. A well-made template could be sufficient in that case.

When it won't:

Property ownership. Blended families. Children from different relationships. Business assets. Anything held abroad. Potential IHT liability. Any realistic chance of the Will being contested. If any of those apply to you, professional help pays for itself many times over. That's not an opinion. That's a pattern I've seen repeated again and again.

Online Will-writing services like ours handle standard situations well. Guided questions. Plain-English explanations along the way. A legally valid document at the end. For most straightforward estates, that does the job.

Where solicitor involvement starts earning its keep is when things get tangled. A business needing succession planning. Property sitting in another country. A blended family where children come from different relationships. An estate well above the IHT threshold. Trusts for vulnerable or minor beneficiaries. Or, honestly, any realistic chance that someone might challenge the Will after you're gone.

A solicitor-drafted Will typically runs between 200 and £500 for a standard case. Sometimes more for estates with moving parts. Set that against what a disputed or invalid Will actually costs. Tens of thousands in legal fees. Months of family conflict that absolutely nobody needed. Think of it as insurance that you buy once and it covers a problem you can't fix retrospectively.

Every mistake on this list is fixable before it does any damage. That's the thing that gets me. None of this is obscure. None of it requires specialist knowledge. You just have to actually do it.

Review your Will regularly. Pick your executors carefully and name backups. Think about tax early. Account for your digital life. And if your circumstances are anything other than dead simple, get professional input instead of winging it.

Your Will is the last set of instructions you leave your family. Not a rough draft. Not a starting point. The actual instructions they have to follow when you're not around to clarify. Making sure it says what you mean, and works the way you intend, is worth the effort.

At Keystone Estate Planning, our online service walks you through it step by step. Clear prompts, guidance at each stage, no legal jargon to wade through. For most families, it's the quickest and most affordable way to end up with a document that does its job when the time comes.