Many of us have social networking profiles, email accounts and blogs. Don’t forget them when you’re drawing up your will.

The growth in the number of email accounts, social networking profiles and blogs has been extraordinary. Many of us have more than one email account and we may have a profile on Facebook, twitter or Linkedin. Others have websites or blogs that are or could be commercially valuable. And if computer gaming is your thing, your profile could be tradeable. But what happens to these accounts when you die? SavvyWoman’s wills and trusts expert, Nicola Plant, has looked at this in detail.

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There are several different types of funeral plans on the market. Which – if any – are right for you?

Reviewed March 1st 2011.

Recently I was at a retirement event where several women asked me about funeral plans. They’d signed up with plans that they weren’t happy with and wanted to know what they could do. Figures from the industry show that over 90,000 funeral plans were sold in 2009 (twice as many as in 2002). Unlike many areas of finance most funeral plans aren’t regulated so it’s worth understanding the small print or you could make a costly mistake.

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The Office of Fair Trading warns that consumers are paying millions of pounds too much for professional executors to sort out their affairs.

Updated 1st March 2011.

According to the Office of Fair Trading, consumers in the UK are spending £40 million a year more than they need to because they’re not shopping around for a will or – more importantly – for an executor who will sort out their financial affairs after they have died. Around one in three adults dies without a will and many people put it off for as long as we can. So perhaps it’s not surprising that, once we’ve decided to arrange one we just want it sorted as quickly as possible. And that’s how we can end up missing out.

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