 Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation, Holographic Will. Prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Support Accounting Instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical, reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again, click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Most of this information comes from Investopedia Holographic Will which you can find online. Take a look at the references resources. Continue your research from there. This by Julia Kagan, updated June 18, 2022. In prior presentations, we've been looking at estate planning then focusing in on particular components and tools of estate planning that might be used depending on the circumstances. This time looking at the Holographic Will asking the first question, what is a Holographic Will? A Holographic Will is a handwritten and testator signed document and is an alternative to a will produced by a lawyer. So in a prior presentation, we went through kind of the timeline process of the estate planning before the time of death. We're going to be thinking how can we be allocating this being our goal, our assets at the point of death in accordance to our wishes and how can we make the process of that allocation as easy as possible on our loved ones. One of the first tools we may think about to do that would of course be a will. So when we think about a will then, then the question is well how are we going to be putting together a will? As things get more difficult, then of course we might need some more advanced estate planning strategies, possibly talking to our lawyer, possibly setting up trusts and so on and so forth from that point or the other option would be to basically make our own will. So these are the questions that could go forward from that point. So some states do not recognize Holographic Wills. States that do not permit Holographic Wills require the document meet specific requirements to be valid. So of course these are laws that are subject to the state and therefore you want to make sure that you're in compliance with whatever laws are required in your particular locale. So the minimal requirements for most states are proof that the test day tour wrote the will, evidence that the test day tour had the mental capacity to write the will, and the will must contain the test day tour's wish to disperse personal property to beneficiaries. So clearly we have some issues with regards to the legitimacy of the will that the state is going to be concerned with. They're going to want to make sure that the person that made the will actually had the intent of making the will, which would hopefully mean that they actually, of course, wrote the will and they're the ones that had, and they had the mental capacity in order to do so. Unfortunately, you can imagine many kind of situations where people don't have the mental capacity and people might take advantage of that kind of situation or possibly having the will written like in duress putting a gun to someone's head or something like that, that would make a will you would think invalid as well would be the general idea. Okay, how a holographic will works. Holographic wills do not need to be witnessed or notarized, which can lead to some issues during will validation in probate court. So obviously when we write the will at the point of death, one of the problems when it goes into probate, that being the court process to validate the will, would be to make sure it is valid. And if it hasn't, it hasn't had a notarized signature or someone witnessing the signature or something like that, that could be a more difficult kind of process. You want to, again, keep that in mind, keep in mind the state laws that are applied when you're making these decisions. To avoid fraud, most states require that a holographic will contain the maker's signature. So that would generally be, you would think, something that might be required by many states in order to make sure it's valid. However, the courts will have to determine whether the will was signed in the testator's signature and by the trustator's hand, in the testator's hand. So handwriting experts or people familiar with the decedent's handwriting must convince the court that the signature was indeed that of the deceased. So clearly one of the things with the handwritten signature is that it should be unique if you had an expert looking at the signature. But again, there's complications with that, especially these days as people might be able to manufacture signatures and copies, signatures and so on and so forth. So as this technological age continues, it gets a little bit confusing, but in any case, problems arise when the handwriting is vague or ill-eligible. As with any will, a testator to a holographic will must be explicit as to named beneficiaries and the receipt of property or assets such as stocks, bonds or fund accounts. The testator may also detail circumstances for recipients to meet to received named assets, which of course that can be fun. Jane, once she's completed one month with this clown nose on, will be able to receive this asset or so. That's probably not how it would go specifically. But in any case, some lawyers recommend that explaining why specific property or other assets such as securities would be left to which beneficiaries would indicate that the testator was of sound mind. So one of the issues of course is going to be when the will was written, were they of sound mind, were they under duress or something like that. So you might argue that if there's rationale within the document as to why you're doing what you're doing, that would indicate some sound mindness possibly. So being of sound mind is a crucial provision in determining the validity of a holographic will. Also, a holographic will argued in probate court may not contain the testator's final wishes. The decedent may have written the holographic will as a draft or may have utterly forgotten to update it. These questions may be brought up in court. Today, there are a variety of software books and websites with detailed instructions on how to create, print a valid will and avoid some probate court problems. So you can do some research on this process in terms of how to set up a will. Remember that generally the idea would be as your assets holdings increase, likely is that you're going to have more complexity involved and then it would be more likely you'd want to have some more detailed estate planning processes, possibly talking to a lawyer, possibly setting up a trust. As your assets are a lower threshold, you would think that you might have sufficient, it might be sufficient in order to look up the ways that you can set up an appropriate will in that case. So if a will is printed as opposed to being handwritten, it requires the witness of at least two people. So you might want to obviously keep that in mind in terms of how can you make the validation process as easy as possible because of course that will make things easier for the loved ones as they go through this process as well. So where are holographic wills accepted? It's important to note that state probate law ultimately decides the treatment of all wills within its borders. So it's not a federal thing, we're on a state-by-state thing, it can change from place to place. Some states will accept holographic wills to varying degrees. These states include Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. In some states, holographic wills made within the state are not recognized, but such wills that are made within jurisdictions where holographic wills are recognized are accepted under foreign wills provisions. In order for the holographic will to be recognized as valid under a foreign will provision where this practice is legal, the holographic will must have been made in a jurisdiction that recognizes holographic wills. States with foreign wills or foreign testament provisions include Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Washington. In New York and Maryland, holographic wills are only recognized if they are made by a member of the armed forces. In Maryland, these wills remain valid only for one year after the testator leaves the armed forces, unless they are no longer of sound mind under the law at that time. In New York, such a will is valid for one year after the testator is discharged from the armed forces or for one year after they regain a testamentary capacity whichever happens first.