Live Q & A Webinar - May 22nd

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:01:59]Mhm.

[00:03:54]>> Mhm.

[00:04:56]>> Hello everybody.

[00:04:57]Welcome to another Legal Wills webinar where I can answer any questions you have about wills and about Legal Wills. Um and um yeah, just anything that questions you have related to different estate planning documents.

[00:05:17]Uh even if you've used our service and you have questions about the way you used it, the way the company works, things like that. I'm happy to answer any questions. And um I'm going to start as I always do with a very quick preamble um to explain who I am and why I'm here and why you're here.

[00:05:37]Uh my name is Tim Hewson, co-founder and CEO of Legal Wills. Started the company 25 years ago with my co-founder, Henry Raud.

[00:05:46]And um it was set up because we realized that there was an issue that every single adult needed a will and the vast majority of people had not written their will. And we looked into why that was, what were the barriers, what was the friction, why people weren't getting around to doing it. Most people knew that it was important. Uh but most people, and it's like 65% of adults in Canada, the US, the UK, just around most of those countries um have not got around to preparing their will. Uh so we looked at the barriers and we looked at what we could do about those. We wanted to make it as affordable as possible and as convenient as possible to get the will written. So we've been developing the service over the last 25 years.

[00:06:38]And uh remarkably it's still a product and a service that's under development. It's something that we enhance every single day.

[00:06:48]Uh there is new work going to our service to make the features better, more intuitive, uh just easier to use and more complete.

[00:07:00]There is a list of things that we still want to do uh to make all of our services that much stronger and uh we're continuing to develop it every single day.

[00:07:10]Um so I also have to say with this preamble uh that I am not a lawyer. I am not a tax accountant. Uh I cannot give you estate planning advice. I cannot give you legal advice. I can simply answer questions related to uh general questions about what a will is and why it's important and uh the ways that you can approach getting a will written as well as the other documents uh that you might need.

[00:07:38]Uh please ask any questions in the chat.

[00:07:42]Uh and I always start and it's it's good to know where people are located because the questions and the answers are very specific to where you are located.

[00:07:54]And very early on when we were developing LegalWills, we realized, well, this is uh tricky because if we wanted to do a living will, which is a medical directive, and we wanted to do that, say, across Canada, well, it turns out that BC is very different to Quebec, is very different to Ontario. They have different names for things, different things that can go into the documents. And that was one of the things that LegalWills did that moved us beyond those will kits and estate document kits that you could buy in Staples. You can buy them now off Amazon.

[00:08:30]I don't know whether I've ever seen one that's specific to a province.

[00:08:35]Um they're usually like the Canadian simple will kit.

[00:08:41]And um one of the things that we did very early on was we realized that these services have got to be very specific to every jurisdiction, every province, every state, every country that we're working in. So, uh it it's important that when you uh ask a question, let me know where you are because the answers will be uh very different. And it was interesting anyway to get a sense of, you know, whether everybody was um tuning in from Canada, uh the US and the UK, and yeah, we support South Africa as well.

[00:09:14]Uh but there were some of our documents that actually work anywhere in the world as well. So, it's just good to know where people are. And it was also kind of cool last week to see that, yes, most people were from Canada, but right across Canada, from coast to coast. Um so, that's that's always good to uh to know.

[00:09:32]Uh as always, please ask any questions you have in the chat. Very happy to answer any questions.

[00:09:41]Uh we've had a lot. I think we've probably done about 10 of these webinars now. Um so, probably answered over 100 questions about wills and um the way you can use our service. So, please if you have any burning questions, then put them in there and I will absolutely do my best to get through all of the questions during the webinar. And um as I say, what it when I wrap up, I'm going to give you my contact information as well. So, I don't get your question on the call itself. Um you can contact me directly and either I will answer it, I will be able to forward it to somebody who knows more about aspects of wills and our service than I do. Uh but one way or another, I will get an answer to you.

[00:10:24]Um So, very cool. Some people uh in BC, people in Toronto. So, thank you for that. I do have some questions that were submitted ahead of time.

[00:10:35]Uh so, what I'm going to do is get into some of these questions now. And uh while I'm answering these questions, again um please put things in the chat and I will get to them as well.

[00:10:48]So, this is uh an interesting question.

[00:10:50]It's like, what documents do I really need in terms of your estate planning documents?

[00:10:57]Uh because we do a lot at Legal Wills and we do some documents and services that are a little bit beyond what people would consider to be their classic estate planning documents. So, I'm going to go through them one by one and explain what the differences are. Um and when you should write each one and when each one is going to be in effect and exactly what each document is going to do.

[00:11:24]Uh so, let's start with the last will and testament.

[00:11:28]So, a will it has to be written, uh while you're competent. You hopefully while you're young and certainly not just when you're contemplating death. It's a document that everybody should have in their filing cabinet. It gets updated over your lifetime whenever your circumstances change or people in the will, their circumstances change. It's just a a document that gets updated throughout your life. It does nothing.

[00:11:58]It does nothing until the moment you die. And we sometimes hear that from people. It's like Oh, my mom's written me out of my will. What can I do about it? And say, well, when did she die? Oh, she's not dead yet.

[00:12:12]She's die you know, she's still healthy, but she's written me out of the will.

[00:12:15]It's like the will doesn't do anything until the person dies. So you certainly can't challenge a will while the person is still alive.

[00:12:25]It's their current thinking about what they might want to do with their assets and with their estate. And so it's really important to understand that yeah, the will comes into effect after you've died and there can only be one.

[00:12:41]What happens is every time you write a will, you revoke or you cancel all of the previous wills. So there's one last will and testament. That is your last the last one you did, your last will and testament and that is the document that everyone's going to work with. So that happens after you've died.

[00:12:59]Every single one of us is going to die.

[00:13:04]Guaranteed. Every single one of us should have a will.

[00:13:08]Some people say, if you don't write a will you have a will anyway. The government's written one for you. The government is going to decide where all of your assets are going to go, who's going to take care of your minor children. The it's there. There's a protocol for doing that, but the will is your expression of exactly what you would want to happen.

[00:13:27]So after the will, the next one that people are typically talk about is a financial power of attorney.

[00:13:33]Financial power of attorney, again, written while you're competent, and um it allows you to name somebody to take care of your finances and let's talk about it in the context of estate planning, take care of your financial affairs if you were ever to lose capacity to do it. You can write a power of attorney to come into effect immediately, um but in the context of estate planning, what we're talking about, it's going to come into effect if or when you were to lose capacity. You had dementia, uh or uh you were in a coma.

[00:14:07]For whatever reason, you can't handle your financial affairs and this document then comes into effect. Usually says, it's going to come into effect when I've lost capacity as determined by one or two physicians. They're going to say, "This person does not have the capacity to manage their own finances."

[00:14:25]And so, at that point, the person you've named in there is going to take over for you.

[00:14:31]One thing that we caution people about is you can't come to us and say, "Oh, my mother, she's lost capacity to handle her finances. She has dementia.

[00:14:40]She doesn't know where she is. We need a power of attorney for her."

[00:14:45]It's too late. Too late. You can kind of become the the carer, the conservator of this person, but you can't easily write a financial power of attorney for somebody who's already lost the capacity to do it. So, it's another one of those things you've got to write it. You've got to have it in your filing cabinet. It's got to be ready to go if and when that situation ever arose. And you may never lose capacity. That's great. You may go straight from having all of your capacity to dead. In which case, the financial power of attorney is never going to come into effect.

[00:15:20]The other point is that the moment you die, that financial power of attorney does nothing.

[00:15:26]It ceases it's immediately cancelled at that moment you die and then the will comes into effect. Those two documents can never be in effect at the same time.

[00:15:34]In a sense, the executor of your will is then stepping out to that role because they're going to take care of all of your assets and your financial affairs.

[00:15:42]So, um power of attorney, the financial power of attorney and the will and then the next one that people typically talk about is the health care medical power of attorney. Um it's a document that has two things. It's your expression of your medical treatment that you would wish to receive receive if you are in a irreversible terminal condition.

[00:16:06]Uh I don't want to be tube feeding or resuscitated, things like that. So, your medical wishes for how you want to be cared for uh if you are unable to speak for yourself. And also you name a representative to speak on your behalf, your substitute decision maker, your health care proxy. It's called different things in different places, but it's the person who's going to be making those decisions for you. So, when the medical team say the person they've been in a coma for 6 months.

[00:16:37]We don't think they're going to pull through.

[00:16:39]What do you want us to do?

[00:16:42]Without one of these documents you could have your parents, your spouse, your siblings all saying, "Ah, we uh we should, we shouldn't, we don't know."

[00:16:52]Um so, what this is going to allow you to do is name somebody. This is going to be the spokesperson who's going to say, "You know what? This is what we're going to do." Uh it could be particular experimental treatments or it it there's some very difficult decisions. And we did a couple of weeks ago having an advanced care planning.

[00:17:09]That's what it's called. Uh and we had an expert talking about this particular topic a couple of weeks ago. So, they're your have key estate planning documents.

[00:17:18]Um now, I would say beyond that, there's a couple of other um obvious ones is an expression of your funeral wishes.

[00:17:27]Uh so, you wouldn't put that in the will. Uh it should be a separate document. It talks about how much uh your family should be spending on your will, for example, bury, cremated, style of service, all of that kind of stuff. It's good to have that. The reason being, the most important reason is that you know, your family's going to have to make some very difficult decisions at a time where they are not equipped to do that. They they're grieving. So, just lay it all out for them. This is what I want. Don't spend more than this amount of money on a casket. Um I'd rather that money went to charity.

[00:17:59]So, just ease the decision-making burden from them.

[00:18:03]Uh so, funeral wishes. And the other one is a list of assets. So, make sure that in when you in your will and you say, "I leave everything to my brother and sister in equal shares, and I'm going to name my brother as my executor."

[00:18:21]Well, what is everything?

[00:18:23]Um how's your brother going to know where all of your assets are, your accounts, what you own?

[00:18:29]Um there's a lot that's involved in that process. So, you can help them a lot by keeping an inventory of all of your assets. And we have a service at Legal Wills that helps you do that. Um it's called LifeLock. And we it can either be printed and stored with your will.

[00:18:47]There could be some issues with that.

[00:18:49]Like, you don't really want that document getting in the wrong hands. Um so, it's also it's an online service that you can update in the cloud. It's encrypted and protected by your user ID.

[00:19:00]And you can name a key holder. Your executor would or your power of attorney would have a key holder ID. They can log in with that. Um and it's secure and only available to them at the right time.

[00:19:11]So, having an inventory of your assets is great uh and and almost a critical part of this whole process.

[00:19:20]And also people to contact, things like that. And uh the last one is just any other files and documents that you might want people to have. And um we have a service called the vault, my vault, and 2 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago, people said, "This vault, I can't get enough information up there." And just recently we up dated that or upgraded that service to give everyone Everybody gets a gigabyte of storage space where they can just throw anything up there, uh which might be either of use to uh the executor or it could be uh personal item that you would want to actually give to a beneficiary, like uh unfinished novel or cookbook or videos, audio files, whatever you want to do, you can throw it up there uh into the vault and make it available to uh your loved ones.

[00:20:10]So, uh hopefully that that covers the key estate planning documents. Well, power of attorney, living will, LifeLock uh vault, funeral services. Six documents.

[00:20:20]Uh if you did want to write your documents at Legal Wills, this would all be under our ultimate package uh where you will get all of those documents. You don't have to sit there and do them all at once. You can take your time, do one um one or more um whenever you want to.

[00:20:40]Like start with your will, follow up with a power of attorney, you can do that.

[00:20:45]Um residual estate.

[00:20:50]So, we do talk when in will writers, we talk about this concept of a residual estate in the will. And And what does that really mean? And And it's a really important concept because actually, I want I want to just go back to I forgot one other document in the complete set of documents.

[00:21:11]Um there's something else that we support at Legal Wills, which is called an expat an expat will, and that allows you to write a will for when you have assets in another country.

[00:21:23]Uh so, if you had if you lived in Canada and you had a condo in Florida or you have property in the UK, you would can write another will. Um so, you could when I say you everybody needs a will, some people might need more than one will.

[00:21:37]Uh so, we have a service called expat will. It's It's not just for expats. Um that's what we've called it, uh but it's a one of the the other documents that you may certain circumstances uh that may be relevant to you.

[00:21:53]So, the residual estate back to that if this was uh not live, I would have cut that cropped it. I don't know if anybody watches Survivor. I did everything in the wrong order. I guess I did that the other day. Um that's that's the problem with live uh streams.

[00:22:10]Um so the residual estate. So what happens is when you write your will the first things you list where all you want all of your assets to go or you but you don't. You list who you want to be your beneficiaries.

[00:22:28]Who you want to be receiving something of your estate.

[00:22:32]So, um it starts with debts, taxes, funeral expenses. They're the first things to go.

[00:22:38]Debts, taxes, funeral expenses are paid out of your estate.

[00:22:42]Uh then it's any specific bequests.

[00:22:47]So my piano to my nephew, uh $5,000 to my niece uh my car to my brother Joe, any particular items that you want to go to particular beneficiaries, you list those out.

[00:23:05]Then is every Then there's your like personal effects, the things in in my house, my furnishings, my clothes, like your your personal stuff.

[00:23:17]Then everything that follows beyond that is the residual estate. Everything else everything else is going to go to this person or be divided between these people in equal shares or everything else, the residual estate will be 10% to this person, 30% to this person, 50% to this charity. However you want to do it, you would divide your residual estate. And the reason why that is done is because if you try to list everything that you owned, it would mean you having to update your will every time you acquire a new asset or got rid of an asset. So if I said, for example, my uh Ford Mustang to my brother, I sell the Ford Mustang, I get uh a new car, then my brother's not getting a Ford Mustang.

[00:24:11]So that means like if it's a specific gift, then he's out of luck. Uh he's not getting that. But if the Ford Mustang is part of the residual estate, it's part of your assets, it's just one of the assets that you own, and you're dividing that residual estate between a bunch of people, then that is still always going to Whatever car you own is going to be part of that residual estate. Uh so the reason why it's done that way is so you don't have to update your will over time every time your assets change.

[00:24:43]So every will is going to have a residuary clause. It's going to say and everything else is going to go to these people, these organizations, divided between these people. Um so that's the long answer to what is a residual estate.

[00:25:02]Again, like if if there are any other questions about anything I'm saying or any questions about how you've used the service, please feel free to put them in the chat or email me afterwards.

[00:25:14]So, that question then leads into well, if I have I leave everything to my wife, how often should I update my will?

[00:25:27]Um So, obviously, it depends. It depends, right? So, if if you have a will that states I leave everything to my spouse and if my spouse does not survive me, I want everything to go to United Way, like a big charity.

[00:25:50]Then, you're going to look at your and and your executor, you've named an executor in the will.

[00:25:58]Let's assume you don't have any guardians for children. So, you've named an executor and over time, not too much is changing.

[00:26:07]Like, you might buy and sell a house, you might move, you might acquire some assets, but fundamentally, that will isn't a whole lot different.

[00:26:17]So, you wouldn't have to be updating that will every year. Um but you need to look at the people who have you've named in the will. So, you need to look at, for example, if you've named an executor and they moved to Australia or they've been taken ill or your backup executor has been taken ill, you've got to go in there and you've got to update your will.

[00:26:39]If United Way changed their name for whatever reason and it wasn't clear who you were referring to, it wouldn't hurt to go in there and update the will.

[00:26:48]Certainly, if you moved countries, you would want to. If you move provinces or states, it it's not actually that critical. Let's Let's Let's take Canada for example, and you move from Alberta to Saskatchewan, and you had a will that left everything to your spouse, that will is going to be fine. A A will written under the laws of any province in Canada is going to be accepted by the probate courts in any other province.

[00:27:13]So, that alone would not necessitate an update to the will. So, that sounds straightforward. You're good then.

[00:27:21]But, not many wills are like that, because wills often have guardianship for children. It has specific bequests in there. Um or something may happen to you during your lifetime when you say, "You know what?

[00:27:34]I've been seeing the work of this charity, and I want to include this charity in my will." So, I'm going to now go back and create a specific bequests for that charity. So, just a change of heart can also necessitate or prompt you into writing a new will, as well. So, we say at least once a year take a look.

[00:27:57]Like, be aware of what's going on around you.

[00:28:00]If you've named somebody to be guardian of your three young children, and they've had triplets of their own, then have a think about it and say, "Well, six kids, that's going to be a lot." Um so, be aware of what's going on around you, and certainly be aware of family members, loved ones predeceasing you.

[00:28:17]Then, yeah, you should definitely take another look at your will. Um when your children become adults, when your children have children of their own, that would change the distribution plan for your will. So, typically for most people during their lifetime, life events would probably cause them to think about, "Well, you know, maybe I should be taking another look at my will."

[00:28:44]If you don't do it regularly, if you don't take at least take a look at it once a year or periodically, you will fall into the trap of a lot of friends of mine who say, "Oh, yeah, I did I did write a will.

[00:28:58]I can't even think of it. It was probably like 20 years ago. So, I've actually forgotten what it says."

[00:29:04]That's a really serious issue because it's still your last will and testament even if you've forgotten what it said.

[00:29:11]That's going to be your last will and testament and that happens more frequently than you would imagine.

[00:29:18]And suddenly a friend of mine said that they wrote their will. Said, "Oh, but you know, I I wrote it before the the children were born, so you're right." And I may have told the story before, but I said, "Your children are 28 and 30 years old now.

[00:29:36]And you wrote your will before they were born.

[00:29:39]Absolutely take another look at it.

[00:29:41]You've named an executive in there who's 30 years older than they were when you wrote the will. So, that as a minimum should be something that you should be reviewing. So, when you update it is a major change in in life event, a significant change of life event to anybody named in the will, a change of asset, um and certainly married, divorced, having children, things like that. No question. They they should be times where you should be um updating your will.

[00:30:14]Um okay. Uh a couple of questions coming in.

[00:30:21]Hi Tim, if one of my adult children predeceases me, how can I include their spouse and our grandchildren in my will?

[00:30:33]So, there's two ways to answer this.

[00:30:35]Firstly, is write a will that has contingencies.

[00:30:40]Right? So, whenever you leave anything to anybody, certainly in a well-written legal wills, you're going to leave something to a person, and every time you do that within our service, it's going to say, "And what if?

[00:30:56]What if this person doesn't survive you?

[00:30:58]What do you then want to happen to what you are leaving this person?"

[00:31:03]So, if you were to leave like 10% or 50 The rest of my estate, my residual estate, I'm going to leave it 50/50 between my two children.

[00:31:14]It's going to say, "Okay, but if one of those child Each of those child were to predecease you, what do you want to happen? Do you want it to go all go to the other child? Or do you want their share to go to their children? Or do you want something else to happen to their share?" So, that's one way you would write that will, or that's That's one answer to this question is writing a will that covers every different contingency permutation of something that can happen. And our service takes you through that almost to the point where it could ask you a final what if, and you may say, "Oh, come on. The chances of that happening are pretty slim."

[00:31:57]Which is true, but we like to pride ourselves on our wills are going to work no matter what, no matter how likely or unlikely it is to happen. You know, you have four children. Well, what if all four of them were to predecease you? And you say, "Oh, come on."

[00:32:12]Um but we're going to ask you that question, uh because we we definitely want the will to work no matter what. Um but the other part of this question is, "Well, what happens if the child predeceases you, and then you go to Then, yes, you should update the will.

[00:32:31]You should go and update the will and change it to say, 'Okay, that 50% I was leaving to my child I now want that 50% to go to my grandchildren in equal shares or it you could say Peggy Sue and Sally like those two in equal shares or you could say I want it to go to their spouse um if that seems appropriate to you as well. So, go in there, take a look. It's an awful situation one of your children has predeceased uh so, write it up so that you don't have to update a will but also if you're competent and you feel that you want to now take another look at your distribution plan, update your will and make sure that your will now reflects uh the things that you you really want to do.

[00:33:24]um I'm going to do this one. We get so many questions about trusts like what is a trust when you were doing a will?

[00:33:32]uh so, there's fundamentally two types of trust. uh there's a testamentary trust uh and and let's call it a non-testamentary trust. Like a testamentary trust is any trust that you've written into your will. And that would likely be a trust for a young beneficiary.

[00:33:55]Like I'm going to leave $100,000 to my grandchild Jimmy. Now, Jimmy's 3 years old right now. um you can't leave $100,000 to a 3-year-old. You would have to uh have a trust set up for them and somebody's going to manage that. So, you have a trustee who's going to be looking after Jimmy's inheritance until they reach the age that you want them to receive it. And that could be 21, 25, you can decide at what age you think this beneficiary would be it would be appropriate for them to um to to receive their inheritance. So, that's a testamentary trust. You can also do things like uh a lifetime interest trust for in a blended family.

[00:34:43]That's also written into the will. It's another kind of testamentary trust.

[00:34:48]But, there are other trusts that you can do which are like managing your assets.

[00:34:52]Um so, putting all of your assets while you're alive into a special like a family trust or a way of protecting them so they're not actually even in the will. They're not assets that are covered by the will. There's loads of different types of trust that you can set up in in the US um and in Canada uh that go look at CRA types of trust that you can set up. You can do it. And that's a way of and it's an estate planning technique to reduce probate fees or an estate administration fees.

[00:35:26]And you would need a tax pro, somebody who really knows what they're doing um to arrange all of your assets uh to shelter them from taxes. That's effectively what you're doing. Um we don't do any of that. We we are not you know, doing tax um avoidance, mitigation, minimization, evasion. We don't we we don't get into that.

[00:35:53]Um Okay, so how do I do the witnessing part of the will? Uh question one. Uh two ways. And this I don't know where you are. Let's assume you're in Canada or the US. Canada and the US. In Canada um every province in Canada requires the will to be printed on a piece of paper and you sign it in the presence of two witnesses. So, we you step through our service, you download and print it, you sign it and have two adults who are not beneficiaries, they have nothing to do with the will, they're not not even a spouse of a beneficiary, they're completely independent, but they can be friends, neighbors, co-workers, anybody like that. But they watch you sign it and they sign it, it's a legal document.

[00:36:36]But they don't have to read the will, they just have to watch you sign and they then sign to say that they saw you sign it.

[00:36:42]Um in Canada, one province in BC, they allow you to do all of that electronically. You can do a video call with um your witnesses and they can sign on a signing pad on a phone and then it I guess put onto the will and it gets stored electronically as well. We're hoping that eventually every province is going to do this, uh but right now it's BC.

[00:37:04]LegalWills has a uh really cool um facility for doing this and supporting electronic signing and storage of wills.

[00:37:12]It immediately goes into your vault. You set up the executor as a key holder, but yeah, we support electronic signing. But for everybody else, right now, 2026, it's on a piece of paper and signed in ink with your witnesses. Um in the US, I think there's 12 14 states that allow electronic signing.

[00:37:32]How does the platform handle revocation clauses? Well, every single one of our wills is going to have a revocation clause. All previous wills are hereby revoked and wills, codicils, testamentary um documents of any nature are hereby um revoked and as soon as you sign and date your new will, any old will is automatically revoked. Um Ah, but sorry, I read the follow-up. I wanted to make sure that it it doesn't revoke a will that you have in place in the US and that is, I said right at the beginning I was talking about an expat will and this would be a great um situation where this would you would use this. You can write a will for Canada to just cover your Canadian assets. You use our expat will for Canada and it says it's not going to revoke any wills that have been written outside of Canada to cover any assets outside of Canada. So, if you were to use a standard will service, it would revoke any previous will that you've written, including potentially that US will, but our expat will service would be ideal for this situation because it just deals with assets and it wouldn't revoke your US will.

[00:38:48]Um I just want to One thing I would touch on as well with the revoking a previous will, it's also a good idea to if you do want to do that, not related to this question, but when you revoke your previous wills, it's a good idea to destroy them, shred them, get rid of them. You don't want five different wills popping up all over the place with different dates on them and revoking them, you don't want to do that. Um And also, we talked a lot about updating wills. The other way you can update a will was is with a codicil.

[00:39:24]Don't do that either. Um they they were really cool in like 1910, um but nowadays, a codicil doesn't offer any advantage or any value and just complete confusion for everybody when you stick a codicil and then another codicil onto a document um rather than updating the will properly.

[00:39:46]Um Okay, so we are at 35 minutes. Um I'm just going to quickly see if there's any uh quick ones I can get to.

[00:39:57]Um And and then I will probably close. Um Oh, yeah, I just want to quickly touch on this one. Is there a difference in preparing wills if you are officially married or not officially married? Yeah, it's a really increasingly common scenario where people live together for a very long time but don't believe in the institution of marriage.

[00:40:26]Um it doesn't fit with their values in 2026.

[00:40:32]Uh and absolutely perfectly entitled to hold that view. No judgment. Uh but I'll tell you what, it makes one heck of a difference if you don't have a will. Uh because different provinces and different states regard common law relationships very differently to each other. And I will tell you that for example, I'm in Ontario and your common law spouse, even if you've lived together for a very long time and you die without a will, they're going to have to jump through all kinds of hoops to receive uh any of your estate. So, the short answer to this question is difference in preparing? Not really because you're going to name typically name your partner as your main beneficiary. Um so, the will is actually going to look quite similar. Uh you could say I leave my entire estate to my spouse, Jenny, or my common law partner, Jenny. Same end result.

[00:41:30]But if you don't have a will, uh there's a world of difference and a world of hurt for your common law partner. So, if you are living in a common law relationship, please write your will.

[00:41:40]Uh it's the most loving gift that you could give your common law partner even if you've showered them with gifts throughout their lifetime. Leaving them with a will and leaving them as the beneficiary of your estate, uh clearly within the will, uh will will allow you to take care of them and dying without a will if you're in a common law relationship, even if you've treated that person and cherished them throughout your lifetime, you've really dumped on them uh right at the end. So, keep that in mind if you are in a common law relationship, please write your will. Everybody needs to write a will, but a common law relationship you absolutely need to be writing your will.

[00:42:26]So, with that I I am going to close out by you know, please get in touch if you do have any questions if I haven't Okay, I'm going to put this one up. Good luck on the free Ottawa marathon. Sadly, not this year. My knees giving out on me.

[00:42:44]My I'm I'm hobbling around at the moment. I had knee surgery.

[00:42:48]Thank you so much for following my running career. That that touches me.

[00:42:52]But, yeah, not this year, maybe next year. But, yeah, I did have knee surgery a month or two ago. So, I'm not going to be running this this year, but good luck to the thousands and thousands of people who will be running it this year. So, with that I would just say, please get in touch.

[00:43:13]Um [email protected].

[00:43:17]More than happy to answer any questions.

[00:43:18]If you have questions about our service, we have an amazing support team, bilingual, who will be able to help you either by email, send in a support ticket, you can call us. We have a text chat on the website as well. So, if you do have any questions, we are more than happy to answer any questions you have.

[00:43:36]So, thank you so much. See you in a couple of weeks. We do have a guest for the webinar in a couple of weeks time, and we'll be sending out some reminders about that and some more information about who will be joining me. So, thank you. Have a wonderful rest of the day, and I'll see you in a couple of weeks time.

[00:44:28]>> Hey.