I thought my kids’ future was secure – a crucial document was invalid

For years, I thought my husband, Mathew, and I had been responsible adults. 

When we were 31 we sat down in our garden one Saturday afternoon to make our wills. We had recently bought our house, and finally decided it was time to draft our wills.

With the help of a gentleman from a cheap online will company, we decided what was going where. It took less than an hour to sort through my ‘life debris’ (a phrase my husband loves to use) and so, by the time our Wills arrived in the post three weeks later, we filed them away, confident.

Only, we never had them properly witnessed.

I spent the best part of a decade not realising this made them invalid.

I was always aware of the need for a Will. I just didn’t have it on the top of my to do list. So many other things took precedence: I was getting married and my career in children’s television was flying.

We soon had kids and the envelopes containing our (unwitnessed) final wishes were quickly buried somewhere underneath expired passports and toddler penne artwork, unsigned and out of date.

In fact, had it not been for a throwaway comment from a will-writer I met while looking for a new job in 2024, I may never have discovered our documents were invalid.

‘It’s crazy parents don’t have a will,’ he said during a potential work consultation. ‘I’d never leave my kid’s guardianship up to the courts.’

Those words were enough for me to race home and dig out our wills to check everything was in order, assuming we would be fine. Though our wills contained provisions for a guardian in case we did have children (it was drafted before we had them), they were unsigned, and thus worthless.

I flipped through them and could see we had scrawled our signatures in seemingly all the relevant places. However, I discovered the final pages weren’t witnessed. 

For a will to be valid, it has to be witnessed properly, with two additional people in the room with you at the same time – something my husband and I had just never got round to organising.

In essence, our wills were useless.

My anxiety immediately kicked into overdrive. I realised I had no idea what would happen if something happened to me and my husband; my kids could end up separated in the care system.

As I started looking into what we needed to do to complete ours, something interesting happened: I found myself becoming increasingly fascinated by wills.

I fell in love with the law, with the fact that the existence of wills stemmed from 1837, the rules, the flow of assets, and just generally how personable they could be. 

I also started to realise just how common our situation was – half drafted, incomplete documents sitting in drawers – especially for emotionally exhausted and administratively tired people like me.

It’s so difficult to know where to start, or how to incorporate a family that doesn’t fit the nuclear mold into a will.

For example, children from previous relationships, cohabiting partners, or friends you consider family, they’re all excluded if you die without a will under intestacy law.

So, when I was six weeks postpartum, with my second child, a full 7 years after we had that first appointment, I decided to retrain as a will-writer.

I wanted to help create wills that reflected the reality of who many of us are in modern life, and also help others avoid making the mistakes I had.

Within months, I’d sat a set of exams with The College of Will Writing, obtained my full Society of will Writer membership and launched my company, Away Wills.

Only then did I get around to finally re-drafting and signing my own will. Our situation had changed so drastically it made no sense to keep the original one. So we started again. 

This time I had a much better understanding of the process so I was able to draft a more comprehensive will that suited our revised needs (including guardians for our children). 

This time it was witnessed appropriately and the relief I felt putting that pen to paper was palpable. 

Since then, I’ve come up against a number of issues that my husband and I faced, including the common misunderstanding about what constitutes a valid will.

To be clear, only a physically signed paper copy of a will counts. E-signatures, scans or PDFs do not count. But there’s also so much more to be conscious of…

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If you get married, your previous will is revoked unless you have a professional draft a specific clause. If you get divorced, it’s even more important to redraft your will. If you pass during the process, it doesn’t matter how estranged you are – you’re still legally married, so your ex-spouse could inherit everything.

Many parents are also not aware that your kids don’t automatically go to your next of kin if both parents die; they’ll be temporarily in the court’s hands until a guardian is appointed. So no, Auntie What’sHerName doesn’t have any automatic rights.  

I’ve seen these issues come up time and again, so my best advice is to not start with the paperwork, but with the people.

Ask each other what matters most. Who you want raising my kids; who feels safest and who the kids know best. When you frame it around love and protection, the rest tends to follow. 

It might seem awkward or confronting to have to tell your spouse that you don’t want their family raising the kids or that you don’t actually trust them with your money, but in my personal experience, it can actually be refreshing to see how aligned you are.

It’s why I now tell my clients to have the tough conversations and not to be afraid of the answers. 

As for my will, I wound up binning the old unsigned version and my new one is safely stored. This time around, it didn’t feel like death planning. It felt like life planning. 

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jessica.aureli@metro.co.uk. 

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