Juhi and her three siblings are now well settled in life across different geographies in the world. She is herself an Australian citizen along with her spouse. While one of her brother and sister are still based out of India, her elder sister was a US citizen. Last year, Juhi and her siblings had to face the fact of life when their beloved father passed away.
Their father was a renowned legal professional and during the course of his lifetime, had invested in various properties across the country, some in his name and some in his daughter’s names directly. He had lost his wife almost 6 years before his demise. Since then, he was efficiently handling his financial assets and different properties for himself as well as his children without any interference or assistance from any of his children.
After a few months after his death, when the children decided to look into his estate and have the same distributed, they came across his Will. But this Will only helped open a chapter of further confusions for his children.
The father had bequeathed some properties specifically to his specified children and for the rest had desired that all the children should have equal shares in the same. Regarding his financial assets, the father had devoted a paragraph in his Will stating that all his mutual funds, equity shares, bonds and balances lying in various bank accounts should be distributed equally among all children. Period. His children were never involved in his finances and they had no clue about neither where to start nor where to end in relation to these various financial investments. There was no list annexed to his Will to help them do the paper work. No folder was available that had the various investment copies neatly organized or indexed. Being a legal maestro himself, the children had never visualized
#MoneyHabits – the Father did not realize that a Will should actually detail out all his assets and investments at one place, giving complete details including the folio numbers, mode of holding, location where the related papers could be found etc.
#Succession: A Will definitely helps in documenting the process of transfer of assets to legal heirs, but it also the one-Master-document that should help the legal heirs to inventorize the assets, investments, accounts along with their values at one place so that they exactly know what they should be distributing among themselves. Merely writing bank accounts, equity shares, bonds and mutual funds doesn’t help.
