Robert had four children. His two sons worked in the family business, while his two daughters did not. So when he wrote his Will, he left the business to the sons and the house and other investments to the daughters.

At the time, it made perfectly good sense. The business was worth several million pounds and, broadly speaking, the four children would receive similar amounts.

The problem was that quite a few years passed between Robert writing his Will and passing away.

The first challenge was that nobody could find it.

Robert had kept the Will in the loft, but had never told anyone exactly where. After a lengthy search, the family were close to concluding that it had been lost and that the estate would have to be dealt with under the intestacy rules. Then one of the daughters found it.

By this point, however, the family business had closed down. After several years of poor trading, it had finally ceased trading three years before Robert died. What had once been the most valuable part of the estate was now worth very little, and the sons had effectively been cut out of the Will.

This did not go down terribly well.

The sons were immediately suspicious. Questions were raised about whether the Will had been faked and planted in the loft, or whether one of the sons-in-law had influenced Robert into favouring the daughters. Before long, an outdated Will had become a fairly serious family falling-out.

Things were complicated further by the fact that both executors named in the Will had died before Robert, so everything slowed down.

There was one piece of good news. Because the value of the estate had fallen so much, there was no Inheritance Tax to pay.

Unfortunately, Robert had also left 10% of his estate to a local charity, partly as an Inheritance Tax planning measure. The charity was already very well funded, and the family were less than thrilled to see a sizeable part of the estate pass to it when the anticipated tax problem no longer existed.

And then a bill arrived for £250,000.

The family had understood that Robert’s final years in residential care were being funded by the state.  It turned out they weren’t.

Whilst this example is obviously made up, the individual elements aren’t. We have seen versions of all of them play out in real life.

The sad part is that Robert had genuinely tried to do the right thing. When he wrote his Will, he wanted to look after his children and divide his estate fairly. At the time, the decisions he made were perfectly reasonable.

But circumstances changed and his plans didn’t. What was intended to provide for his family ended up creating suspicion, resentment and a major family fallout.

That is the point. Having a Will is not the same as having an estate plan. Businesses change. Asset values change. Families change. Executors die. Tax positions change.

A good estate plan needs to change with the circumstances. It needs to be reviewed regularly, not written once and left in the loft for twenty years.