All I can say is better than no will at all.
Wills are challenged all the time no matter how or who prepares them. If you are broke there's never a problem.
challenging them is one thing .... being able to over ride the deceased;s wishes because of mistakes in verbiage is another .
we had another situation where it was clearly spelled out that some estranged grand children were to get nothing from their grandfather ...
well a missing sentence in the documents pertaining to predeceasing opened up a whole can of worms when the courts said the document was defective .
the judge said the intent was clear , those kids were to get nothing , but he can't rewrite history or add missing words ...
that missing sentence cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars as we had to buy the estranged kids out of a family business they were to see no part of .
i brought the two sets of paper work we ran in to with us when we looked in to estate attorney's for our own paper work .
we asked the estate attorney if he could review those documents .
it took a minute and he said we could have potential issues with the fact one made no reference to any other children , as well as in the other there was nothing pertaining to my wife's first husband dying before his parents as far as my wife's entitlement now that he was gone .
so estate attorneys with experience are usually good at avoiding these amateur mistakes we ran in to .
by the way , these were two different issues with different families . the missing word issue was my ex wife , the missing verbiage about predeceasing was my current wife.
the judge said that his court room today is filled with issues from ill prepared wills and trusts that people get either on line or from attorney's who are not estate attorneys and just go on line and print wills for clients .
here in new york , many don't know that power of attorney has switched to a new more lengthier form because of elder abuse ... brokerages and investment houses do not have to recognize the older no longer statutory form .
so doing these things on your own is rarely a good idea . there are no do overs once you are gone . no one ever thinks there is anything wrong with their documents while they are alive or not incapacitated. it is the heirs that find out .
