Codicils for wills can be useful, thorny

J. Paul Getty was born in 1892 into a wealthy oil family. He worked in the family business and, eventually, became fantastically wealthy in his own right.

He was a playboy who fell out of his father’s favour as a result. He had to earn his fortune the hard way, by his own efforts.

By the time he passed away, Getty was one of the world’s wealthiest men.

He taught himself to speak Arabic and purchased oil rights to tracts of land in the Saudi Arabia and Kuwait before oil was discovered there. His most widely quoted remark? “The meek will inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.”

He first wrote out his will in September 1958 and proceeded to amend it 21 times over the 18 years that followed as heirs were added and removed.

Each change was made by way of a “codicil,” a short document that amends an earlier will. Typically two pages long, it is commonly used to make small changes to the will, such as replacing executors or changing a cash gift from one amount to another.

Codicils were very popular in the 1800s, when all legal documents were handwritten by legal clerks, usually twice — once in draft and the other to be signed.

In the 1900s, wills might have been typed on a manual machine with carbon paper. Now, with computers and word processing software, the temptation is to amend the whole will and hit “print.”

As soon as you make one change to a will, you often are forced to make other changes before you reprint it in its entirety.

Names have to be freshened. Technical language must be updated. Stale clauses appointing guardians for children, now adult, have to be deleted. The job can get big, and quickly.

It is often easier to make the simple change by a one page codicil.

However, codicils can be a problem if the will-maker gets carried away. It becomes very difficult to figure out who gets what if you have to wade through a handful of codicils, each amending the other as well as changing the original will.