Holographic Will
Categories: Trusts and Estates, Retirement
It sounds like a will from the future. You press a button. A holographic projection of your deceased loved one appears. Then the life-like recreation describes all the reasons they decided to leave their immense fortune to their cat.
In reality, though, a holographic will is the opposite of a futuristic alternative. It's decidedly old school.
A holographic will consists of a last will and testament that's written out by hand (like when your great-great grandpa would write letters to Teddy Roosevelt complaining about the price of a three-cent stamp), and then signed by a testor. So...not a nice, typed copy prepared by a lawyer. More like a few sentences scrawled on a cocktail napkin at 3 am.
As such, holographic wills can fall into a legal grey area. Some states don't allow them at all. Others accept them, but have enacted rules about what they need to look like in order to be accepted as valid. This way, a person in their death throes can't just write with lipstick on the bathroom mirror "the cat gets it all!"