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For parents of minor children, the Will is not primarily about who gets your assets. It is about who raises your children, how their inheritance is managed, and how education is funded through their most vulnerable years. Here is what every parent of a minor child should include in their Online Will.
If both parents die together — a car accident, a plane crash, a house fire — someone must raise the children. Absent instructions in a Will, the family court decides. Family court decisions are not always aligned with what the parents would have chosen.
The Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act 1956 recognises a testamentary guardian appointed via Will (section 60). The Guardians and Wards Act 1890 (which applies to all religions) gives significant weight to testamentary appointments during court proceedings, though the court retains supervisory jurisdiction in the child's welfare.
In the Online Will, you have a one-click 'appoint spouse as primary guardian, with sibling as substitute' option. Use it — that is the minimum. Better: name a primary guardian, a substitute, and an alternate.
An important nuance: 'guardian of the person' (upbringing) can be different from 'guardian of the property' (financial management). Your sister may be the right person to raise the children, but your chartered-accountant brother-in-law may be the right person to manage the inheritance. The Online Will allows separate appointments.
A default inheritance transfers to a minor as an outright lump sum on attaining majority (typically age 18). For most parents, this is not what they want. A 30-lakh inheritance handed to an 18-year-old is more likely to be spent on a car and a foreign trip than saved for education or a first home.
A well-drafted Will for a parent with minors implements a staged release. Sample structures:
Note: the Online Will has some capacity to implement staged release through a residuary clause with conditions, but full testamentary-trust construction is a Personalised Will (₹25,000) situation. For substantial inheritance to minors, the Personalised tier is worth the difference in price.
Set aside a specific corpus for the children's education. Structure: 'I bequeath ₹50 lakh to the Children's Education Fund, to be held by [trustee] and applied to the primary, secondary, undergraduate, and postgraduate education expenses of my children, until each child completes their formal education or reaches the age of 25, whichever is earlier. Any residue at that point shall be distributed equally to each surviving child.'
This clause protects the education fund from being pulled into general household expenses of the surviving spouse or the guardian. It also protects it against a spendthrift spouse or guardian.
Even without a formal trust construction, the Will can name a specific individual as 'education-fund trustee' with instructions.
You almost certainly have term insurance. On your death, the payout goes to your nominee (typically your spouse). The Will can direct how the surviving spouse must use it — but only if the drafting is careful.
Better structure for parents of minors: name a testamentary trust as the nominee (or beneficiary) of the term insurance, with the surviving spouse as trustee. The trust's terms are laid out in the Will and include specific direction that the corpus be preserved for the children's education and adulthood, not for household expenses.
This is again a Personalised Will territory. The Online Will can at least ensure the Will and the insurance nomination are coordinated (both point to the intended eventual beneficiary).
Both parents should have Wills. And the Wills should be coordinated. Common structures:
Parallel Wills: each spouse's Will leaves everything to the other; on the survivor's death, everything goes to the children.
Reciprocal Wills: each Will explicitly acknowledges the other Will's terms. This can be useful for tax planning across life stages.
Joint Will: a single document signed by both spouses, used less commonly in India. Consider only under advocate advice.
For parents of minors, parallel Wills is the standard. Both spouses use the Online Will (or the Personalised tier). Both name the same testamentary guardian(s). Both structure the residuary to protect the children.
Uncomfortable to think about, but essential. If a child pre-deceases you, does their share pass to their children (your grandchildren), or does it merge with the surviving children's shares?
Standard drafting: 'per stirpes' — a pre-deceased child's share passes to their own descendants. If the pre-deceased child had no descendants, the share is divided among surviving children.
Alternative: 'per capita' — always divided equally among surviving descendants of the parent generation.
For most families, per stirpes is the correct default and it is what the Online Will implements by default.
If a child has special needs — physical, cognitive, developmental — that child's inheritance planning is genuinely different. The child may never be able to manage assets independently. The child's needs may exceed what standard financial planning provides for.
For special-needs children, a well-drafted Will establishes a special-needs trust: a corpus held by a trustee, income and principal applied for the child's care and benefit throughout their life, with a residual beneficiary (usually siblings or a charity) receiving whatever remains on the child's death.
This is not Online Will territory. This is Personalised Will or Succession Planning territory. Do not economise on drafting when a special-needs child is involved.
Draft your Will now. Include: (a) testamentary guardian appointment for each child, (b) staged-release inheritance structure, (c) education fund earmark, (d) term-insurance coordination if possible, (e) per-stirpes substitution.
For substantial estates or special-needs situations, upgrade to Personalised Will (₹25,000). For the majority of middle-class families with minor children, the Online Will (₹5,000) with careful attention to the guardianship and staged-release fields is the right tier.
This is general legal information, not legal advice. For your specific circumstances, consult a Law Tarazoo advocate.
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