Three out of five people don't update their wills
Howard Lake | 25 November 2006 | News
New research from Cancer Research UK shows that three in five people have never updated their will, despite almost two-thirds of wills being made over five years ago, and a third more than 10 years ago.
The survey, carried out with BMRB, interviewed 1,000 people nationwide in all age groups and found that many people do not update their will even after a significant change in their personal lives. A change in family curcumstances was the most common reason for a will to be out of date – marriage, divorce, receiving an inheritance for example – and was cited by 75 per cent of those with an out-of-date will.
Over 40 per cent of those with children who said their wills were out of date said it was because people they now plan to leave to are not included in their will, which could suggest wills had not been updated since their children were born.
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Happily for charities, 16 per cent of those who do hav ea will said it was out of fdate because it didn’t include a gift to charity that they now intend to make.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.