A quarter million dollars is an absurd amount of money to waste. It's what your son or daughter could pay an attorney in a battle about your will. Add the bills for the second child in combat and together they could spend $500,000. The house they're fighting over may not be worth much more and your destroyed family will be collateral damage. How can you prevent war from breaking out after you've gone off to your heavenly reward?

First, execute a will that is typed, witnessed, and notarized. These are the basic criteria for the probate court to accept a will as your directions for giving away what you own after you die. If you don't want to pay a lawyer to meet you in person and then draft and notarize your will, you could use a website to make a will. If you go online, choose a provider that connects you in real time with an attorney licensed in your state. He or she will ask questions that should ensure your will is valid.

Laypersons don't know what they don't know about wills and probate. By the time your children read the will you drafted without an attorney, it will be too late to correct mistakes they might find. They won't care that you saved a couple thousand dollars when the magistrate says your will was ambiguous or left out crucial facts, and that the court cannot enforce what you wrote.

If your will is tossed, your estate could pay an attorney more than a few thousand dollars to apply the laws of intestacy -- the laws for those without a will -- to apportion your estate, according to the Uniform Probate Code. If your estate is small, your estate attorney's work will be minimal but in every intestate estate your personal preferences are replaced by a generic formula dictating who gets anything you leave.

If you created a trust in years past and planned to put your house in that trust, now is the time to verify you recorded a new deed, which is a declaration you no longer own your house. If the deed was recorded in the registry, it is public information that your trust has title to your house. It also means anything in your will about the house is irrelevant. If your will gives your house to loved ones when you die and you put your house in a trust after you signed the will, your loved ones in the will are headed for disappointment if they're not also beneficiaries of your trust.

In Massachusetts, you are not obligated to give each of your children something when you die. But if you have a child who will receive nothing, your will should mention that child by name and state you intentionally disinherited him or her. If you don't, he or she might hire an attorney to claim you wrote the will when your mind wasn't up to par. Your offended (if not aggrieved) child would claim you would not have intentionally left him out of the will.

The most potent -- perhaps even severe -- tool in a Massachusetts will is a few sentences stating if anyone contests what he or she has been given by you, that person gets nothing at all. It's a salvo from the grave to keep the family peace.



PHILIP ARCIDIACONO, ESQ., IS THE PRINCIPAL OF ARCHDEACON LAW ASSOCIATES, A LAW FIRM IN CONCORD AND LUNENBURG, MASSACHUSETTS, SPECIALIZING IN ELDER LAW AND ESTATE PLANNING. HE CAN BE REACHED AT PA@ARCHDEACONLAW.COM. THE FIRM'S WEBSITE IS WWW.ARCHDEACONLAW.COM.