Minding Your Legal Business VI: 10 compelling reasons to make a will

1. To give funeral directions;
2. Your personal representative can exercise authority immediately upon your death and not have to wait until the High Court issues a grant of probate or letters of administration to deal with urgent matters;
3. To ensure that the person who manages your estate as your personal representative is the person whom you would have entrusted such a task to, and not leave it to be determined by law;
4. For unincorporated sole entrepreneurs, to provide a fair degree of ease in the carrying on of the day to day affairs of your business until your estate is administered;
5. Provide certainty in respect of children born out of wedlock or de facto adopted children;
6. To protect family assets and the future of the family general, including in situations where the interests of minor children are at stake, by establishment of trusts which take effect under the will;
7. To make charitable donations or gifts to loved ones who are not entitled by the laws of intestacy to share in your estate, or to displace the shares in your estate that the intestacy laws give to your loved ones, if you so desire;
8. If you are the executor of an estate that you are in the process of administering, to create ease of continued administration of that estate by a legal concept called a chain of representation;
9. Where you have no next of kin according to the laws of intestacy, to avoid the Government becoming the beneficiary of your property; and
10. To reduce the expenses incurred in applying for administration/probate in your estate.

Grenada Bar Association