Leaving a Personal Legacy in Your Will
Writing a Will can be a sobering thing. But having one is an essential step in protecting your intentions and wishes for what you want and how you want your estate and assets to be distributed are followed. But it’s also so much more than that. It’s a statement and reflection of your values, your wishes, and your life.
Leaving your estate to your family and friends is the most common way of distributing your assets after you pass. However, in recent years it has become more and more common for individuals to reflect their personal values in their Will and leave their own legacy by gifting parts of their estate to charities.
Why should I leave a personal legacy (gift) in my Will?
When writing their Will, some people ask themselves,
“Why should I bother leaving a personal legacy in my Will? After all, what difference can one person make in the grand scheme of things?”
But this is precisely the point. By creating a personal legacy, you are showing that your life mattered; that despite being just one individual, you made a significant impact on those around you and left the world a better place than when you found it.
Unfortunately, there is a misguided perception that gifts (bequests) left in Wills are only for the wealthy, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Anything from a sentimental item to a financial gift, the assets left to your chosen charity will go a long way in showing your values and principles are carried forward into the next generation - no matter how big or small.
By leaving a bequest in your Will, you’re assisting your chosen organisation(s) to continue to undertake their vital work, while enabling the values that you carried through life to continue long into the future.
How do I leave a personal legacy in my Will?
Whether you have an existing Will or you’re about to write it for the first time, it’s never too late or early to start planning and documenting your legacy.
Depending on how many organisations you want to support, it can be difficult to choose where you want your bequest to go, so we’ve compiled a list of handy questions to ask yourself before submitting your Will:
What causes or movements do you deeply care about?
How do you want to see your personal legacy carry on?
What kind of asset do you want to leave in the bequest?
How many different charities do you want to support?
Where do you think you could potentially make the largest impact?
Here at Footprint, we’ve made it super easy for you to be able to have a bequest in your Will. We have integrated with the New Zealand Charity Register to assist you in automatically populating the charity number and other details to ensure your generous gift reaches the right cause. All you need to do is enter the type of bequest you want to leave and enjoy the peace of mind knowing that one of your last actions will be to support and make a difference to a cause that has always been close to your heart.
What types of legacies can I leave?
There are plenty of ways to leave a legacy behind, but the main three forms of bequests are:
Residuary Bequest: a gift of whatever is left in a Will after all other assets have been distributed.
Specific Bequest: a gift that you have specifically highlighted to leave to said organisation or person in your Will.
Whole Estate: a gift of your entire estate
The power of leaving a legacy behind
No matter the size of the bequest, leaving a gift to a charity in your Will is an impactful and effective way to help your legacy live on through causes that make the world a better place.
With many global challenges facing our planet and population, it’s often overwhelming to think about how you can make a difference. But leaving even the smallest of gifts to a charity that is close to your heart will give you the contentment that one of your last actions was to make a difference to those in the next generation.
There’s no greater legacy than that.
