Changing executor of will from a solicitor

OldMusicGuy

Keep_pedalling said:

It is not a particularly odd thing for a will to contain especially if the cash gifts are relatively small in relation to the size of the estate. Our wills have some to minor beneficiaries.. Gifts to charities are also monetary values rather than percentages. This is nothing to do with old minds thinking differently. 

It's not necessarily an odd thing but in our case my FiL was giving a lot of rather large bequests to a number of relatives. This meant that once he went into care and his total estate was smaller than he anticipated, the share of monetary bequests was larger than that going to his children. And the longer he lived, the smaller the children's share was getting. This was not what he wanted but of course he had no idea about the priority of bequests.

He left a couple of small monetary bequests to charities but the bequests to relatives were all treated as %age shares.