Dear Richard Madeley: ‘Does the child I educated privately deserve less in my will?'
I have children from both my marriages. My eldest was educated privately; my other children were at private prep school for a couple of years until it became obvious I could not afford to educate them all privately.
Eventually I could no longer afford the school fees for my eldest out of my income (I was forced by court order to continue to pay them). My parents had died and I had inherited their modest estate, so I set aside the proceeds of their property as a fund to be used to pay the fees as and when they became due. This fund was exhausted.
Though my own estate will be small, I want to be fair. So my question is this: in my will, should I divide it equally between all my children, or adjust it to favour those who had no benefit from their grandparents' money while their half-sibling benefited to the extent of tens of thousands of pounds, by way of fees?
–Anon, Liverpool
Dear Anon,
I am absolutely clear about this. Where almost all wills are concerned, I've always been a firm adherent to the principle of KISS: the usual formula is 'keep it simple, stupid', but let's make it more polite and say 'keep it super-simple'.
The moment you start to make fine adjustments and calculations based on differentials in who received what, when, and why in your lifetime, you're lost. You'll find yourself in a huge minefield, Anon.
Unless you're blessed with the wisdom of Solomon, you can never get it right. However hard you try to steer a course based on fairness, balance and recompense, you're almost certain to come unstuck. Not while you're still here, obviously (unless you try to explain your complicated reasoning to everyone before shuffling off the coil), but afterwards, when it's too late to do anything about the damage you risk doing. Which is leaving a legacy of strife and resentment.
Take the case of your children's education. You played the cards that were dealt to you (you had no choice). So what if that meant your (modest) inheritance from your parents ended up being unequally distributed? You did your best.
I think that if you leave more of your own estate to the children whose education was not financed by your late parents' bequests, there'll be no end of a row. The child who did receive their post-mortem assistance will feel – perfectly understandably – unfairly penalised; even, in part, disinherited. In any case, schooling aside, are you sure your spending on them all as they grew up was absolutely equal, down to the last penny? It can't have been. Life doesn't work like that.
It does you great credit that you have such a developed sense of fairness. But you're overcomplicating things. I recommend you share your estate absolutely equally between all your children. Remember: KISS.
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