Re: | Page 38

from ore M The Archers – where there’s a Will, there’s a disappointed brother… As faithful readers may recall, I have written about the Archers before and the show is, after all, designed to reflect everyday life. A recent storyline involved Ed Grundy and his family, who have been staying with his girlfriend Emma’s parents for a while due to lack of funds, taking a tenancy of a house owned by Ed’s older brother Will – Will lets out this house for income as he gets free accommodation as part of his job as a gamekeeper. So you might be wondering how on earth one brother is a man of property, while the other is not at all well off. Unfortunately, it was all down to someone failing to update their Will. To go back to the beginning, curiously, the house in question (Number 1, The Green) was where Emma actually grew up when her family lived there as council 36 tenants. Her parents bought the house under the Right to Buy scheme in the early 1990s, and when they upscaled later on, a local developer bought the house to add to his portfolio of rental properties. Moving on to 2007, an aged Grundy aunt was on her deathbed. When she died, it turned out that she had a Will written after Will was born, which left him a substantial share of her estate – but she never updated her Will when Ed arrived and so he received nothing, against the £120,000 which passed to his brother. Will bought the house and started to receive the rental income, while things for Ed went from bad to worse… Of course, it is sometimes possible to change a Will after the testator’s death but this needs proper legal advice and in this case, as Archers fans will know, Will and Ed are not big on brotherly love and it is highly unlikely that Will would have shared his inheritance with Ed. The moral, therefore, is to regularly review your Will and update it as needed, particularly on the occasion big events like gaining or losing family members, births, marriage, divorce etc. As with many things in life prevention is better than cure and our very busy inheritance dispute team is testament that many people are not keeping their Wills up to date. See me or my colleagues in the Probate, Trusts and Wills Department for further advice and assistance, to ensure your affairs don’t turn into a soap opera! By Rebecca Haywood