Making a Will is one of the most important things that you can do for your loved ones and ensures that your wishes will be followed after your death. Despite that, over two thirds of people in London die each year without making Wills (intestate) leaving the state to decide who will inherit. Will writing is not a complicated process and although you can do it yourself, it is safer to call in the services of a professional. That way you will be sure that your Will has followed the correct legal procedure and is valid.

The Will department of the Probate Bureau can advise on Will writing and draft a professional legal Will that best covers your interests. The Probate Bureau also provides storage facilities based in London, so even if your copy of the Will goes missing, following your death it can be produced easily.

The inheritance laws are simple to understand and in the absence of a Will, they will be applied. For example, the law does not count any non-legalised relationships such as cohabitation as grounds for inheritance. If this is your situation, it might be that following your death, your beloved partner of 20 years is left with nothing while your long lost brother in Australia inherits the lot! An extreme sounding scenario but sadly this is not that uncommon. Friends or carers are likewise ignored, despite any extenuating circumstances or special relationships you may have.

If you have children or dependents, your Will protects their future and outlines their future care in accordance with your wishes on what is best for them. You can also make a charitable donation. Wills help charities continue with their vital work and even a small bequest is appreciated.

In some cases, you may need specialised legal advice before Will writing. A watertight Will is essential if there are a number of people, who could make a claim on your property, for example. Other types of more complex Wills include the setting up of a trust fund from your estate or there may be other issues. Wills can be as complex or as simple as you need and taking professional advice is crucial to making the best decision. Remember that Wills must be updated following changes of circumstances, for example following a divorce, or birth in the family.

Wills make life much easier for your family after your death. You can state whether you wish to be buried or cremated and the type of service you want. Although you may feel at the time of Will writing that you do not really care, it will help your family at a time when they will be struggling to cope with bereavement following your death.

Wills help keep things simple and avoid the cost and upset of litigation after your death. Many people enjoy the process of Will writing and find peace of mind knowing that all their affairs are in order. Contact the Probate Bureau and find out more about their Will service and fees and if you live in or around the London area or in England meet with a representative in your own home.

A Trust fund can be created at any time and be used for a variety of purposes. Trusts enable you to pass on money or property while you are still alive, can protect the family’s assets after your death, fund a charity, or protect the assets of someone who is too young or incapacitated to deal with financial matters themselves. Trusts are not a new invention. One of the oldest trusts in existence is the City of London Trust, which has been in operation for the last 800 years and is used to finance a range of activities including the maintenance of Tower Bridge.

Although trusts can be set up at anytime, the best option for most people is to create a trust as part of the will. After all, unless you have a lot of property and assets, while you are still living you can probably administer your financial affairs yourself. Although there can be tax advantages to setting up a trust to work while you are still alive, most people do not have enough assets to make this option viable and it is simply not worth the expense.

A trust as part of a Will can help protect your family if anything happens to you. If you have children, you can stipulate that your estate can be held in trust for them until they are old enough to be able to be trusted with financial decisions. That way you will know that they will not blow the lot on a round the world trip or a ritzy pad in London once they hit 18! You can instruct the trust to make regular payments to them but they will not have access to the fund. You can set an age when the fund can be released, based on when you judge that they will be mature enough to look after a lump sum of money.

You can also stipulate where the trust money is to be spent. For example, you can specify that it be used only for educational purposes such as school or university fees, and earmark that the release of further funds will be dependent on gradation or passing exams. A trust fund ensures that the inheritance you leave your children and dependents will remain intact and not at risk from third parties, bad advice and youthful exuberance.

Trusts can enable you to continue to help your descendents after you have gone. By adding a trust to your Will it will help you benefit the next generation. If you do not have children yourself, you can set up a trust fund for someone else, the children of close friends, a charity, a cause you believe in, or anything else that you chose.

However you feel about money, one thing is certain you cannot take it with you! Making a trust will allow you to carry on doing your best for your family or your favourite charity long after your death. If you wish to find out more about Trusts and get some professional advice you can contact the Probate Bureau. If you live in London or the South East, you can meet with an adviser in your own home.

The probate process can seem a daunting prospect that most people only have experience with following the death of a loved one. Whether it is an expected death such as by terminal illness or old age, or the result of an unexpected and untimely accident, the grief and shock of a death can be very hard to deal and come to terms with. In London alone, around 10 people die unexpectedly on the roads each day and illustrates just how death can strike any of us at random.

The point is that when most people die they leave a whole range of affairs that need to be sorted out. The probate process usually falls to the next of kin to arrange, just at a time when they are suffering from the grief of bereavement. It is a complicated process that has to be dealt with at a time when many people freely admit to not being able to think straight.

The term probate simply means administering or looking after the estate of someone who has died. When you consider the amount of paperwork and assets that most of us accumulate in a lifetime it can be a big job. Property, pension plans, tax ,premium bonds, contracts, stocks and shares, bank accounts , insurance policies all have to be sorted out and any proceeds from these must be passed on to the correct recipients.

The affairs of someone who dies are often messy and complicated especially if the death is unexpected, and they must be arranged and dealt with according to the law. The probate process is part of this legal function and is in place to protect against financial wrongdoing after a death.

If there is a Will, an executor or executors will have been appointed by the deceased, beforehand to deal with affairs in the case of death. The executor must apply to the probate registry for a grant of probate and this gives them the legal right to deal with the deceased persons assets in accordance with the terms of the Will.

If the deceased person has not made a will and has died intestate, the next of kin must apply for a letter of administration to be able to carry out the probate process.

The Probate Bureau was set up to help people through this difficult time and offers a range of services that will help you. Whether you wish to do probate yourself or employ a legal representative to do it for you, the Probate Bureau will be able to help you do the right thing and carry out your obligations.

In some cases, a grant of probate or letter of administration is not required. If the estate of the deceased is under £5,000 for example, it may not be necessary. However making this decision in itself can be complicated and you may run the risk of failing to locate funds that legally may be owning to you or the family. There are estimated to be millions of pounds left unclaimed from deceased accounts in London alone so it makes sense to get the correct legal advice and make sure that the probate process is carried out correctly, why not use the Probate Bureau.

Dealing with the affairs of a deceased person can be complex and distressing and it can be hard to know where to start. Whether you are the next of kin or executor, the Probate Bureau can help you start the process or help you through every step of the way if you need it. The Probate Bureau offers probate help suitable for all situations. Getting some probate advice to determine whether you need a grant of probate or a letter of administration is the vital first step in ensuring that you carry out your role in the best way possible. If you live in or around London, the Probate Bureau can visit you in your own home or you can speak to one of our advisers free of charge on the telephone.

The legal process of administering a deceased estate, also called probate, involves sorting out money owing and distributing assets to the correct people. Probate can be lengthy and complicated whether or not the deceased has left a will.

Although it may seem hard to face, especially in times of bereavement, the faster that you obtain probate advice the easier it will be for you. For example, you may be able to defer the funeral expenses until money is released from the estate. This can be a huge headache for people who find themselves dealing with an unexpected death and lack the ready funds to pay for the funeral. Getting probate help will ensure that any expenses that you pay out will be reimbursed once the estate is distributed.

When a person dies, he or she leaves a range of issues that have to be dealt with, from the simple cancellation of a mobile phone contract and store card accounts, to the sale of a property and the disposal of the house contents. The Probate Bureau can arrange independent valuation and the sale of the property. In London, England especially the value of property can be high and subject to extreme fluctuations so it makes sense to ensure that the property is sold for correct market value. After all the deceased person would probably want to help his or her own family financially, and not an estate agent! 

In some cases where there is no close family, next of kin or will, you may find yourself as the nearest thing to a close relation or friend. In these cases, probate advice is essential. The Probate Bureau can help in verifying the family tree to determine where the funds of the estate should go. Whatever your situation, the Probate Bureau will provide you with a set fee for services that can be paid from estate proceeds, once it is resolved

The Probate Bureau offers a range of services that will give you real probate help. Professional probate advice can be as simple as just advising you whether you need a letter of administration or probate grant. It can be as complex as proving entitlement to the proceeds of a property sale. In London alone, thousands of people lose out each year by not taking the correct probate advice so make sure that this does not apply to you.

Whilst most people write their Will simply to ensure their family are provided for and to stipulate their funeral wishes, others use it as a way of settling old scores or expressing their beliefs.

Below, we have picked some of the more colourful Last Wills and Testaments to have emerged to highlight just how powerful a Will can be:

1. Famous British singer Dusty Springfield made sure that her cat was extremely well provided for in her Will. Strict instructions stated that he was only to be fed imported baby food and was to be serenaded with her records. It was even arranged that he would ‘marry’ his new guardian’s pet cat.
2. 1960s rock icon Janis Joplin made changes to her Will just 2 days before her death from an overdose on 4^th October 1970. Although the majority of her estate was left to her parents, she set aside $2,500 for an all-night party for 200 friends at her favourite pub so “my friends can all get blasted after I’m gone”.
3. Arizona hermit and miner, James Kidd, went missing in 1949 and was legally declared dead in 1956. His Will was later discovered in 1963 which stipulated that his entire $275,000 estate was to be used to prove the existence of a human soul which leaves the body at death. More than 100 petitions for the inheritance were dismissed by the courts and it was awarded in 1971 to the American Society for Psychical Research. Disappointingly, they failed to prove the existence of a soul.
4. The next Will is that of wealthy tanner John Bowman who outlived both his wife and two daughters. In the final years of his life, he became convinced that on his death his entire family would be reincarnated together. Due to this belief, he provided in his Will for a $50,000 trust fund to pay for the maintenance of his 21 bedroom mansion and mausoleum. Servants were left with instructions to prepare dinner for the family every night in case the family were hungry when they returned from the dead. After his death in 1891 his Will was honoured and the instructions were carried out until the trust fund ran out of money in 1950.
5. Samuel Bratt is one man who used his Will to get even. In life, his wife never allowed him to smoke his favourite cigars. Embittered by this, in his Will he left his £330,000 estate to her, on the condition that she smokes five cigars a day for the rest of her life.
6. In 1841, German poet Heinrich Heine married Eugenie Mirat, a clerk at a Parisian bootshop. In his Will, he left her everything on the condition that she remarry. His explanation for this was that “then there will be at least one man who will regret my death.”
7. American radio personality Jack Benny had been married to his wife Sayde for 48 years when he died the day after Christmas in 1974. The day after his funeral, Sayde received a single, long-stemmed rose from a florist. She then received another the next day, and the day after that. Some people say she phoned the florist and demanded to know where the roses were coming from. However, it’s more likely that she just read his Will. In it Jack set aside money for a rose to be sent to her every day for the rest of her life, she lived another 9 years.
8. The inventor of the Frisbee and sport ‘Disc Golf’, Ed Headrick, often joked to his son that he wanted to live on as a Frisbee after his death. No one took him seriously but he made it clear that he was not joking when he made his Will. After his death in 2002, his body was cremated and the ashes used to make a limited number of ‘memorial flying discs’ which were to be distributed amongst friends and family. Those left over were sold with the proceeds to go towards the creation of a ‘Frisbee and Disc Golf  history and memorabilia museum’.
9. What would you do if you had few friends and no family? Would you leave your estate to charity? Well, Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral da Camara, a wealthy Portuguese bachelor, decided to be a little more creative. Thirteen years before his death he made a Will leaving his entire estate to 70 strangers he randomly selected from the Lisbon phonebook. When contacted, most of them thought they were being scammed but each of them received several thousand pounds from the estate.
10. Last on our list is British explorer Sir Walter Rayleigh, responsible for the introduction of tobacco in Europe. Aside from making bequests to relatives and charities he also included the following paragraph:

“I wish every smoker in the kingdom to be invited to my funeral in every way possible, by letter, circular and advertisement. Every smoker who takes advantage of the invitation shall receive as a present ten pounds of tobacco, and two pipes on which shall be engraved my name, my crest, and the date of my death. The poor of the neighborhood who accompany my bier shall receive every year on the anniversary of my death a large package of tobacco. I make the condition that all those who assist at my funeral, if they wish to partake of the benefits of my will, must smoke without interruption during the entire ceremony.”

In addition he requested that his coffin be lined with wood from his old Havana cigar boxes, and a package of French and Dutch tobacco be placed at the foot of his coffin. He also asked that a box of matches and his favorite pipe be left at his side.