It is important to see to your estate planning early on in your adult life to maintain control over the eventual distribution of the assets you will spend a lifetime accumulating. Yet another vital point to remember is that even after you have created a will, the estate planning process is not over. Your will should be reviewed throughout your life to ensure that its stipulations reflect your current desires. Oftentimes, such reviews will reveal where revisions should be made. This prompts many in Columbus to come to us here at The Law Offices of Saia, Marrocco & Jensen Inc. asking how they can revoke an existing will.
Updating a will can ultimately introduce contention into the estate administration process as those whose interest in your estate are affected by updates may dispute their validity. Thus, you will want to ensure that your revocation of an earlier will is indeed legitimized. Drafting a new and updated will does, in fact, invalidate an earlier will (or certain provisions therein). Yet often that may not be enough to avoid a dispute. For this reason, it is often recommended that you present actual evidence of a revocation. According to Section 2107.33 of Ohio’s Revised Code, tearing, destroying or obliterating a will in the presence of witnesses effectively revokes it. This can be done in any of the following manners:
- By you yourself destroying it
- By you witnessing its destruction
- By offering written authorization to destroy it
You can indeed ask that a will that has already been validated and submitted to a probate court be revoked by petitioning the court to revoke it. Remember too that in order to revoke a will, you need to have the mental capacity to understand your decision. More information on revoking a will can be found throughout our site.
