One small mistake can make your entire will useless. I’m Sarah Siedentopf. I’m an estate planning attorney in Atlanta, Georgia. So one thing that I see again and again is people who have done a will but they didn’t sign it or they didn’t get any witnesses. If you have something living on your computer that you have never gotten around to printing out and signing in front of witnesses, you don’t have a will. It’s completely useless. Legally, the law does not care at all what you wanted. If it’s not in a binding will, it’s nothing. If you signed it and you didn’t sign it in front of witnesses, we still don’t have anything at all. Now it’s really nice to have a notary too that can make it self-proving so that after you pass away, we don’t have to go out and find those witnesses to sign something for the court saying, yes, I really did watch the testator sign that will, yes, I really knew what was going on. They knew what was going on. Everybody meant to do it. But another catch is we gotta have the right witnesses and the right witnesses, it’s almost everybody, but it’s not someone who would inherit. All of your closest family members and potentially your closest friends cannot be your witnesses. So what if you do a will and your child is one of the witnesses? If you were a witness to a will, you cannot inherit under it. You’ve just cut out your child from the will entirely. Another issue we see a lot that could be or could not be invalidating to the entire will, but could definitely cause a problem is where some things are changed or initialed, things are inconsistent. And there’s a question about was it all this way when it was signed? Did somebody try to go back later and change it? If it wasn’t done in front of two witnesses, it’s not a valid change. So there can be a lot of legal battles and fighting when a will is not done in the correct way at the beginning and if it’s not changed in the correct way so that there’s, you know, hand marking and, you know, changes that we really can’t tell when they happened. It invalidates it. Your plan does not work. If you’ve got a will living on your computer that you haven’t printed and signed, let’s leave it there. Come see us. We will help you do a will. We will make it quick and easy for you and we will set you up in our office with two witnesses and a notary that we provide so they’re not named in your documents. It’s not an issue. We will make sure that everything is signed appropriately. If you’ve been thinking about a will or making notes on a napkin, let’s come in and get it legally done.
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