The £20 will kit that could cost your family everything

The will kit from the shop shelf or the £20 template site looks like sensible thrift: the same document, a fraction of the price. But DIY wills sit behind a striking share of the estate disputes that reach the courts — not because the forms are badly printed, but because the value of a will was never really in the paper. Here is where the kits fail, in the order they usually fail.

The execution trap: a precise ceremony, unsupervised

The law — section 9 of the Wills Act 1837 — requires a specific ritual: you sign (or acknowledge your signature) with two witnesses physically present at the same time, and they then sign in your presence. Get that ceremony wrong — one witness on Tuesday, another on Thursday; a signature added later; a page signed alone and posted round — and the will is simply void. You die intestate holding a worthless document that looks perfect in the drawer.

The kit cannot stand over your shoulder at the kitchen table. That final step is precisely where homemade wills die.

The witness trap: the nearest people are the wrong people

If a beneficiary — or a beneficiary's spouse or civil partner — acts as a witness, the law does something quietly brutal: the will survives, but that person's inheritance is wiped out. And who is in the house when the homemade will comes out? The husband, the wife, the children — the exact people named on the page.

The vagueness trap

“I leave my money to my family.” Which money — the ISA, the account, the proceeds of the house? Which family? Homemade wording is where disputes are born, and a construction argument in court costs more than a hundred professionally drafted wills.

The gap trap: no plan B

What happens if a beneficiary dies before you? Professional wills build in substitutions as a matter of course. Kits rarely do — so part of the estate can fall into intestacy anyway, defeating the entire point of the exercise.

The biggest failure: no advice

A kit answers the questions you ask it. It cannot spot the question you didn't know existed — the capacity issue, the relative applying quiet pressure, the blended-family time bomb, the ownership structure of the house, the inheritance tax context. You cannot fill in a form to solve a problem you cannot see.

None of this means a solicitor's will is a luxury purchase. Fixed fees have closed the price gap to a fraction of what most people assume — and what you are buying is not the paper, but the certainty that the paper works.