Locating a Will and a Dementia Problem

GTG

My girlfriend has asked me for some advice with regard to her elderly parents.

Both her parents have forgotten who they saw to make their will out. The obvious suspect their bankers don't have it. They have only ever used a solicitor once in their lives and that was to buy there flat about 10 years ago and yes they have forgot who that was. They don't have any paperwork anywhere either.

Her father has the early stages of dementia and her mother is 81 and very forgetfull so it is in part understandable. Two questions:

1) How do they locate the will, there must be a central registry?

2) The will was made out in the presence of both of them, that they can remember but if the dementia progresses and he becomes non compis mentis will her mother have the legal right to amend it without his approval?

Any help on the matter greatly appreciated.

TIA

Nicki

1. There is no central registry of wills, sorry. However, if you make a new will then your old one is automatically revoked. If they can't remember what's in the will or want to change it, this may be the way to go. They will need to move quickly though to ensure her father had the mental capacity to do this (and it may be too late)

2. Provided they didn't make mutual wills, then either can amend their will without reference to the other. Mutual wills are very rare so it is unlikely that they did. Her mum doesn't need her dad's consent to dispose of her own assets. So far as joint assets are concerned, these will go to the one who survives longest, who can then dispose of them how they wish. If they died at the same time and there was no way of telling who died first, the older would be deemed to have died first.

If one of them dies before you have solved this problem, the executors will need to advertise in the legal trade press for the lost will. This usually solves the problem provided the solicitor is actually holding the original will (sometimes the solicitor simply drafts it, and gives the original back to the client to keep). If no will can be found, the estate will be dealt with as if the person had died intestate, so depending on how much the estate was worth, it would either go all to the surviving spouse or be divided (not in equal shares) between the spouse and any children.

Hope this helps

Bossyboots

Another thing you could try is to write to every solicitor locally asking if they have the will. Obviously this has costs implications unless you can deliver them by hand and while this might seem a huge task, in reality it may not be so.

If you go to the Law Society website and then Choosing and Using a solicitor, you can use the search option to search by town and Wills and Probate as the field of work. I imagine many, if not most, of these will have a website and e-mail contact details anyway to make it easier.

You should really ask the parents to sign a document stating that they are happy for information to be disclosed to you as strictly speaking they should not even tell you whether they were ever clients, never mind whether they hold the will. You would need to enclose a copy with every letter or attach to every e-mail. This is a common way of resolving this problem and a pretty successful one.

GTG

Thank you both for your very helpfull replies.

We have been brainstorming the subject and recall them telling us along time ago that they had them done free of charge through her father's ex employer London transport. I have searched on the internet and found London Transport have a benevolent fund which at the time of them making a will offered a free willing making service. We are hopefull that this is where it is otherwise we will have to go down the laborious avenues suggested.

Her father has not yet been officially diagnosed with any mental illness but goes to see a specialist 22nd Feb. We are wondering if we should be persuading him to do something now to his will in order to avoid a difficult situation should his mental status change for the worse.

Any more advice appreciated.

Thanks

Nicki

I don't think it would make a difference to be honest. If he saw the specialist on 22 Feb who judged him at that point to be incapable, then there would be reason to suspect he had also been incapable in the few weeks before hand, and the will would still be open to challenge. I would leave things be, as extra stress about having to change his will quickly may exacerbate this problems, and skew the findings of the assessment