I thought I’d follow up on how I wrote a will leaving money to EA charities, following my previous question about it here. I ended up drafting a will myself and haven’t yet had it checked by a solicitor. I’ve gone down this route as I’m still youngish and so having some probability of the will failing does not seem like something worth spending hundreds of pounds to avoid at present—if I were 20 years older, I may have considered that worth it. For context I’m resident in England, and these steps are not necessarily good to follow in other countries—I can’t say.
My process was to firstly get a free draft will from www.freewills.co.uk . I copied the text to a document I could edit and set out the clauses specifying the distribution of the estate, using wording from https://www.givewell.org/legacy-giving and https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/bequests, and including some extra wording about cause areas to allocate the bequests to, which I checked with GiveWell and GWWC beforehand. I also added sub-clauses about what to do if these charities no longer exist (just general instructions to say my Trustees should use their judgement and about how they could identify charities in line with my wishes, with a couple of examples—if GiveWell or GWWC did cease existing, I intend to update my will, so these clauses should only matter for a fairly narrow window of time and so super high-quality wording doesn’t seem needed).
Following this previous Forum post, I added the following clause after the clauses setting out the bequests as an extra failsafe:
But if the trusts hereinbefore declared shall fail or determine then and in that event my Trustees shall stand possessed of the said residue of my estate UPON TRUST to transfer pay or apply the same to or for such exclusively charitable institution or purpose or exclusively charitable institutions or purposes and if more than one in such proportions as my Trustees may in their absolute discretion select.
I thought I’d follow up on how I wrote a will leaving money to EA charities, following my previous question about it here. I ended up drafting a will myself and haven’t yet had it checked by a solicitor. I’ve gone down this route as I’m still youngish and so having some probability of the will failing does not seem like something worth spending hundreds of pounds to avoid at present—if I were 20 years older, I may have considered that worth it. For context I’m resident in England, and these steps are not necessarily good to follow in other countries—I can’t say.
My process was to firstly get a free draft will from www.freewills.co.uk . I copied the text to a document I could edit and set out the clauses specifying the distribution of the estate, using wording from https://www.givewell.org/legacy-giving and https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/bequests, and including some extra wording about cause areas to allocate the bequests to, which I checked with GiveWell and GWWC beforehand. I also added sub-clauses about what to do if these charities no longer exist (just general instructions to say my Trustees should use their judgement and about how they could identify charities in line with my wishes, with a couple of examples—if GiveWell or GWWC did cease existing, I intend to update my will, so these clauses should only matter for a fairly narrow window of time and so super high-quality wording doesn’t seem needed).
Following this previous Forum post, I added the following clause after the clauses setting out the bequests as an extra failsafe:
Then I got it signed and witnessed. See https://www.gov.uk/make-will/make-sure-your-will-is-legal .
Keywords to aide searching, as searching for “will” brings up lots of other things!: testament, writing will, leave money to charity