The Best Place to Store your Will
Wills or any end-of-life documentation (health care directives, powers of attorney and enduring guardianships) should be stored somewhere securely, and in an easy to access location, people often store these documents in a filing cabinet or a locked safe. Other options include storing your Will with a lawyer, it is important that you let trusted people know that this is where you have decided to store your Will.
You should never store your Will or important end-of-life documents in a Safe Deposit Box, unless someone else has access and the box is jointly managed by those who survive you. It can be that the bank may require a court order to access the box – which can obviously cause significant delays in access.
When end-of-life approaches, often these storage decisions are lost or have not been effectively communicated, if you are sitting by your families bed side and need to access documents at 2am in the morning, a lawyer is not going to be available to assist you until business hours. This all causes more stress and anxiety than necessary in what is already a difficult time.
iDecide offers a central storage house for all of these documents – it allows you to nominate trusted people to be informed of what you have stored in iDecide and provides access that can be unlocked when required.
It is of most importance to let people know where your Will is stored.
Whether you store your Will with iDecide or elsewhere you must let others know so that it can be easily accessed when the time comes.
If people can’t access your Will or do not know where it is, it is like it was never made at all.