Handwritten Wills

Video

Good morning, folks. It’s Andy Stautz at Stautz Law. Today I’m back with another talk about a common estate planning question or it’s really a kind of an estate administration question. And that is a handwritten will or what lawyers call a holographic will.

What is a Holographic Will?

Holographic is just a fancy legal term for handwritten.  

Common Reasons for Holographic Will

So a lot of times you’ll see this for people who maybe don’t trust lawyers and they want to do it on their own. So they’ll, you know, write out their own will, they were probably more common back in the day before you had computers and you could just print stuff all the time.  

Or someone maybe, maybe in their last illness they don’t have time to do formal things. And you know, they’ve got maybe a notebook or a diary and they write a page in their diary saying, you know, “I want the house to go to so and so.”  

Is a handwritten will valid in Indiana?

So the common question is, OK, well, in Indiana, are holographic wills valid? Is a handwritten will valid in Indiana? And the answer to that is a handwritten will is not special in Indiana, so it’s valid if it meets the other requirements for validity.  

Requirements for a Handwritten Will

That means it has to be witnessed. You know, and signed. If there’s a self-proving clause, great (But I’ve never seen one on a handwritten will.) So it doesn’t matter. Your will does not need to be printed on fancy paper. You can handwrite it, but you still need 2 disinterested witnesses.  

Handwriting Alone Not Enough to Prove Validity

Unlike some other states, some other jurisdictions, or you know, way back in the day, the fact that it’s in your handwriting alone is not enough to prove you know, to make it valid, to prove that it’s yours. 

So that really trips people up a lot. You know, if you if you go into probate and you say, well, you know, “mom left everything to so and so” It’s like, well, you know, there’s probably a moral obligation or an equitable obligation…. that that was her last wish, but last wishes that aren’t embodied in valid documents aren’t going to hold up in court!

Estate Planning to Avoid Handwritten Will Problems

So on the planning side, that’s a big oopsie, right? You know, that’s a disaster. You wanted something to happen and it didn’t work because you didn’t do the legal formalities.  

It leads to lots of conflicts too, because then you’ve got, you know, the person with the handwriting in their favor… They’re not going to get along with the intestate heirs, that is, the people who get the property if there is no will at all.  

So you’re asking for trouble.  

But short answer to the question: a handwritten will in Indiana is valid only if it meets the other requirements for validity. Nothing special about handwriting.  

(There’s a tiny exception for, you know, like immediate death, like battlefield situations. But that’s not relevant pretty much ever.) 

So I think that’s all I had to say on that one. It’s just kind of a cautionary tale. Don’t assume that because it’s in handwriting that it’s going to be valid. Just the cost of the probate, much less the fighting it causes… You know, doing a little bit of planning ahead and making sure you’ve got your documents is going to forestall this so that we don’t have to deal with this question in your estate.  

That’s all I’ve got for today. Thanks for watching and I hope it’s been helpful. You can call me or book an appointment online if you want to talk about this or any other estate planning or state administration topic. Thanks. Bye.