Wills & Estate Lawyer in Kippa-Ring

A kit or a template supplies the wording and leaves the execution to the household. In Kippa-Ring 28.4% of households are lone-person households, the lowest share of the five Redcliffe peninsula localities, so most homes have other people in them and the witnesses end up being whoever is around.

Section 10 requires the testator's signature to be made or acknowledged before two or more witnesses present at the same time, who then attest and sign in the testator's presence. Simultaneous presence is part of the requirement, and a will that does not meet the formalities can be challenged or refused probate.

A will's execution is only looked at when someone seeks authority to deal with the estate. Administering a Queensland estate usually needs a court-issued grant, and where there is a valid will and the named executor acts, that grant is a grant of probate.

By that point the person who signed the document cannot say what happened at the signing or correct it, and a will that fails the formalities can be challenged or refused probate. Around 17.7% of Kippa-Ring's population is aged 0 to 14 — a derived figure, so read it loosely — and where children are still at home a will made now may sit untouched for decades before anyone reads it.

Kippa-Ring records the lowest median total personal income of the five Redcliffe peninsula localities at $625 a week, with median household income at $1,297, and what a will costs is among the questions people most commonly raise about this service.

A cheap document is not cheap if it is challenged or refused probate. The delay, cost and uncertainty then land on the people who were relying on the person who died.

Flats and apartments account for 2.1% of Kippa-Ring's occupied private dwellings, the lowest of the five and by a wide margin, while 77.6% are separate houses and 20.3% are semi-detached homes or townhouses — the highest attached-housing share of the five. In Kippa-Ring 32.4% of occupied private dwellings are owned outright and 29.6% are owned with a mortgage.

Real property has to pass under the will and, in most cases, through a court-issued grant rather than by agreement between relatives. The title does not move until the document is proved, which is precisely when its signing is examined.

Across Kippa-Ring's 2,568 families, 37.2% are couple families with children and around 23.7% are one-parent families — figures that describe a locality, never a particular household.

Where dependants are involved, a document that is challenged or refused probate turns into delay and expense at the worst possible moment, and the person who signed it is no longer there to explain it.

Formal validity and adequate provision are separate questions. A will can satisfy section 10 and still not make adequate provision for a spouse, child or dependant, and under section 41 of the Succession Act such a person may apply to the court for provision out of the estate, generally within 9 months of the death, though the court has a discretion to allow a late application.

Both failures land in the same place — a court, after the will-maker has died. Getting the execution right removes one of them; thinking the provision through at the drafting stage reduces the other.