Can I Write My Own Will and Just Get It Notarized in Minnesota?

Can I write a will myself and just get it notarized?

My name is Andrew Ayers. I'm an attorney located in Edina, Minnesota, with an office in New York City, and today let's look at a pretty common question that came up on Reddit, one that a lot of my clients ask as well.

So this Reddit user asked, "Can I just write a will that says 'cremate me when I die and give my crap to my brother to do whatever he wants with it,' then if I get married and maybe have children later, reassess the situation? I'm in my thirties and don't have that much stuff besides a few cars and my house, but I still owe 80% of the value on it. But if I sit down and think about it, if I were to sell my cars, tools, motorcycle, things and house, that is probably $120,000 worth of equity, and that's only going to go up as I pay my mortgage and live in my house. So if the motorcycle kills me or whatever, I'd rather that stuff not go through the state to make a mess of it."

So this is one of the most common questions I get. Do I even need an attorney? Could I just write my will myself and have it notarized? Now, first of all, the thing I'm going to warn you about is, in these situations, the most common mistake we see is actually the execution piece: making sure we're properly signing your will, making sure it's notarized. But the notary should also include two witnesses in that signing ceremony. Especially in Minnesota, one of the requirements is we have two witnesses. We prefer for them to be disinterested witnesses, meaning people who wouldn't inherit under the will. So in this person's situation, we would want to make sure that we have two witnesses and a notary public. And it looks like he or she has a brother, so you want to make sure that the brother is not going to be the witness to the will.

Now, before we just write something up, the other thing we need to consider is what do these assets actually look like. So things like cars: if you're in a state like Minnesota, you can actually have a transfer on death designation for your cars and motor vehicles, and that acts like a beneficiary and transfers that vehicle to whoever you'd like it to go to without having to go through probate court. He also apparently has a house, and that can also be used with a transfer on death deed to transfer directly to somebody, as opposed to having it go through probate court. So we have two tools right away that, working with a lawyer, you can use to make sure that these assets don't actually have to go through probate court. Looks like a lot of the other things they have are things like tools and stuff in the house, and those are the kind of things that we can use a personal property memorandum on.

Now, what we're seeing here at the end of his question is, "I don't want it to go through the state to make a mess of it." And that tells me something different than just "I want to write up a will and notarize it," because you need to remember that a will is designed to go through your probate court. It is not designed for you to avoid the probate court. Those other things I just talked about, transfer on death designations, beneficiary designations on your retirement accounts, on your life insurance policy, those are tools that we can use to stay out of probate court, to reduce the amount of money or things that have to be done by the probate court. And so if we take our vehicles out of the mix, we take our house out of the mix, and we take our main assets out of the mix with beneficiary designations, you may not even have to open a probate.

So if you're like this Reddit user and think that you can just draft up your will, you definitely can, but there's two things to look at. First of all, make sure it's done correctly and signed correctly. But second of all, talk to an estate planning professional, because you may find that that will may not be doing what you think it's going to be doing. It's just going to run your things through probate, when you can use other tools to move forward and have your family not have to deal with the probate court.

Again, my name is Andrew Ayers. On my website, AndrewMAyers.com, if you'd like to hop on the phone and chat about your situation, there's a red button at the top. You can schedule a consultation with my office. If you liked this video, hit the like or thumbs-up button below. You can head over to YouTube or AyersLawTV.com to subscribe for future episodes. And just like this user on Reddit, I just want you to know that although you can draft your will yourself, there are a lot of little pitfalls, a lot of little things that can go wrong, so working with a professional to get the right guidance can help you avoid the simple mistakes.