A will is a legal means of disposing of your assets at death. If you do not have a will, then the legislature of the State of Texas has written laws of “intestate succession” that determine who gets your assets at death. Another way of looking at the issue is to think of the intestacy laws as the “default” means of disposing of a person’s assets at death, which he can vary by writing a will. One interesting feature of Texas law is the ability to write what is known as a “holographic will”, which will be honored by the courts if it is executed correctly. A holographic will must be written wholly in the handwriting of the testator and may be validly executed without the use of witnesses. (See Texas Probate Code Section 60.) In Texas, a signature by initials is sufficient to execute the instrument as a will if the will is otherwise “testamentary in character”, i.e., the writing shows the maker's desire to make a revocable disposition of his or her property to take effect after the maker's death, and the will need not be dated. (Cason v. Taylor, 51 S.W.3d 397 (Tex. App.-Waco 2001).) A holographic will that includes the signature somewhere in the instrument is sufficient to be regarded as a signature for a holographic will, even if it is not at the bottom or end of the holographic will. (In re Estate of Brown, 507 S.W.2d 801 (Tex. Civ. App. -Dallas 1974).)
These minimal criteria for a valid holographic will in Texas has led to the admission of some unusual documents as wills. In one case a greeting card that had the following writing on it was admitted as a holographic will: “Last Will: I leave everything to Verneice Daniels. BHD.” (Although it should be noted that the court in that case took into consideration the fact that the person who wrote the will was a practicing attorney –which tended to suggest that he knew what he was doing when he wrote it.) (Trim v. Daniels, 862 S.W.2d 8 (Tex. App.-Houston [1st Dist.]).) It is important to understand that it is possible for such an informally written document to be considered a valid will in Texas for at least two reasons. First, it is a cheap way of writing a will for yourself. Although hiring an attorney to write a formal, attested will, is preferable, this may not always possible in all circumstances, and the holographic will gives you a quick and easy means of disposing of your assets at death. The second reason to have some understanding of holographic wills is because if someone close to you dies, although they may not have written a formal, attested will, they may have written a holographic will which includes you as a beneficiary. Or, they may have written a formal, attested will that did not include you as a beneficiary, but then subsequently wrote a holographic will that revokes the prior will, and includes you as a beneficiary. It’s also possible to amend a prior, formally attested will with a “holographic codicil” in Texas. ( In re Estate of Brown, 507 S.W.2d 801 (Tex. App. –Dallas 1974) The holographic codicil might include you as a beneficiary. It is easy to imagine a situation where a person having considerable assets may have had a friend or lifelong companion that they intended to leave assets to at death, but they never got around to writing a formal, attested will. However, the now-deceased person may have written a letter or some other written instrument in their own handwriting that is signed and was intended to be a will, and, in fact, is testamentary in character. The point is: don’t just assume that because someone didn’t hire an attorney to prepare a formal will signed by two witnesses, that they didn’t write a will in Texas.
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