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Changing Beneficiaries in a Thai Will?
Transcript of the above video:
As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Will's here in Thailand. Changed circumstances will oftentimes dictate that a Will or the terms of a Will, be changed. For example if you have beneficiaries to a Will and they pre-decease you, and unfortunately this happens more often than I'd like to see it candidly. We will see somebody who will have drafted a Will with us; they had their beneficiary set and then they will say "oh, so and so pre-deceased me." There may also be circumstances where people decide to change their beneficiaries. Down the road they may say "well I have decided I am going to leave this to a different person" or "I'm going to make these provisions rather than those provisions", and they decide to go ahead and change the beneficiary.
Under such circumstances generally speaking, and I state this generally, the Thai Attorneys here in our office tend to advise to do a new Will. It can be done by sort of an amendment or what we call a codicil in the Common Law vernacular but depending on the circumstances in a given a case, the formalities may be such or the desired formalities may be such that just a new instrument might need to be drafted.
Now that said, especially where we are dealing with somebody who has drafted a Will with us before, it's not going to be like writing a Will again from scratch. We're going to basically be dealing with a new document but oftentimes we have largely the gist of the document already in place and we can usually make those changes fairly quickly, and it's not going to be a matter of dealing with everything starting from scratch. Now again, depends on the circumstances. If somebody wants to sort of fundamentally alter the terms of their Will, that may dictate further work. Again circumstances are going to drive the analysis of what is best for a given client in their specific position.