Does your will cover everything you own? Here’s what can go wrong

Can a will be legally valid and still be incomplete?

A will may be legally valid and yet fail to dispose of the entire estate. That distinction matters because a valid will is not necessarily a complete will.

Specific gifts often receive most of the attention in estate planning: a house to one beneficiary, investments to another, money in a particular account to someone else. But those bequests deal only with the assets expressly covered by them.

Years later, the house may have been sold, the bank account closed, and the testator may have acquired new investments, shares or other assets.

The will may remain perfectly valid. The difficulty is that those newly acquired assets may not have been specifically dealt with. Unless the will contains an effective residuary provision, part of the estate may remain undisposed of.

The residue matters

That is precisely the role of the residuary clause. Sections 102 and 103 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925 deal with the residuary legatee.

In essence, they allow a will to identify who should receive the residue of the estate and provide that the residuary legatee takes property belonging to the testator at death that has not otherwise been effectively disposed of by the will.

The residue is not confined to assets acquired after the will is executed. It can also absorb property that has not otherwise been effectively disposed of because another testamentary gift fails or lapses.

In that sense, the residuary clause is not simply a catch-all for new assets; it is a structural safeguard against gaps in the testamentary scheme. Without one, part of the estate may still fall into partial intestacy despite the existence of a valid will.

When gaps emerge

That can have significant consequences. Undisposed assets may become subject to the applicable rules of intestate succession, separate proceedings may become necessary, and the eventual distribution may differ materially from what the testator intended.

That is why the residuary clause should not be treated as boilerplate or an afterthought. The drafting of the residue deserves as much attention as the specific gifts themselves.

It should clearly identify the residuary beneficiary and, where appropriate, provide for substitute beneficiaries so that the residue itself does not fail.

The better question is not merely what the will expressly covers, but what happens to everything it does not.

The residuary clause is what helps bridge the gap between a valid will and a complete will.

Rohit Jain is the managing partner and Keshav Singhania, head, Private Client at Singhania & Co.