The problems with keeping your will at home

Keeping your will at home is free, immediate and completely understandable. It is also the option that goes wrong most often. We would not be doing our job if we did not set out honestly why, and what you can do about it without spending much.

Why almost everyone starts here

You come home from signing your will, you put it somewhere sensible, and that is that. The drawer in the sideboard. The box file with the passports. The bottom of the wardrobe. It feels safe because it is in your house and you know where it is.

The difficulty is that a will has to survive an event you will not be present for, and be found by people who were not there when you put it away. That is a much harder job than it looks.

Problem one: it gets lost, and the consequences are severe

This is the big one, and it is not a rare occurrence.

If a will cannot be found after a death, the estate may be dealt with as though no will was ever made. The rules of intestacy then decide who inherits, in a fixed order set by law. Those rules take no account of what you actually wanted. An unmarried partner of thirty years can receive nothing. Stepchildren you raised can receive nothing. A charity you meant to support gets nothing.

The people left behind usually know a will existed. Knowing is not enough. Without the document, the wishes it recorded may simply not take effect.

Problem two: it gets damaged

Paper does not cope well with ordinary domestic life over a period of decades. Damp in a loft or a garage. A burst pipe. A small fire that never reached the room but filled it with smoke. Sun-bleaching on a windowsill. Ordinary wear from being handled and refolded.

A damaged will is not automatically invalid, but it creates work and cost at the worst time, and in some cases doubt about whether it can be admitted at all.

Problem three: it gets thrown away

House clearances are brutal, and they usually happen quickly, often during bereavement, often by people who do not know what they are looking at. A folded document in a carrier bag of old paperwork goes into the skip along with twenty years of bank statements. This happens more than people imagine.

Problem four: nobody knows it exists

A will can be in perfect condition, perfectly safe, and completely useless, because the executors do not know it is there.

This is the quietest failure of the lot. Nobody did anything wrong. The document was fine. It just was not found in time, and by the time it turned up the estate had already been distributed under the intestacy rules.

Problem five: the marks a will picks up at home

This one surprises people. When a will is submitted for probate, the condition of the document matters. If it shows signs that something was once attached to it and removed, an extra staple hole, a rust mark from a paperclip, a torn corner, a page that has clearly been separated, the probate registry may ask for an explanation before accepting it.

That usually means a sworn statement from someone who can account for the marks. It is not a disaster, but it is delay, cost and stress for your executors, caused by nothing more than a will living in a drawer and being handled.

Which leads to the practical rule: never unstaple your will, never attach anything to it, and try not to handle it more than you need to.

What about a home safe?

Better than a drawer, and worth having for other reasons, but it solves fewer problems than people expect.

Small domestic safes are fire-rated for a limited period and temperature, and many are not rated for paper at all. They are also portable, which is precisely why burglars take them whole. And a safe does nothing about the biggest problem on this list: if nobody knows the will exists, or nobody can open the safe, you are back where you started.

If you do use one, make sure someone you trust knows the combination or where the key is, and that they know what is inside.

"My solicitor stores it for free"

Then you are in a much better position than most people, and there is no urgent reason to change anything. Just check two things.

Do you, and at least one of your executors, know the name of the firm holding it? Write it down somewhere they will look.

And what is the firm's arrangement if it closes or merges? Firms do both. A will is meant to last decades. It is a fair question and any decent firm will answer it.

What to do instead

You have three sensible routes, and they are covered properly in our comparison of where to store your will.

Leave it with the firm that wrote it, and make sure your executors know which firm that is. Deposit it with the probate service for a one-off fee. Or use a dedicated storage service, which keeps the document safe and keeps a record that it exists.

Whichever you pick, do the one thing that costs nothing and prevents the most common failure: tell your executors that a will exists and roughly where it is.

If you would like a record of where your documents are kept, you can register that for free, whether or not you store anything with us. If you would rather we held the originals, storage starts at £19.95 a year, with free scanned copies on request and free release to your executors when your family needs it. The detail is on our pricing page.

General information, not legal advice.