More than half of American adults don’t have a will, according to surveys by Caring.com and Gallup conducted in recent years. The reasons people give are consistent: they haven’t got around to it, they don’t think they have enough assets to make it necessary, they find the topic uncomfortable, or they assume their spouse or family will automatically receive their assets anyway. All of these assumptions are either wrong or significantly more complicated than people believe. Dying without a will — legally called dying intestate — transfers control of what happens to your assets, your minor children, and your unfinished financial affairs to state law and court proceedings, which may produce outcomes very different from what you’d have chosen.
What a Will Actually Does
A will is a legal document that specifies your wishes for the distribution of your assets after death, names the people responsible for carrying out those wishes, and — critically — names a guardian for any minor children if both parents die. Without a will, a probate court distributes your assets according to your state’s intestate succession laws, which follow a rigid formula based on family relationships that may not reflect your actual wishes. Intestate succession typically passes assets to spouses and children first, then to other relatives in defined priority order. If you’re unmarried and have no children, your assets may pass to parents or siblings you’re estranged from rather than to the partner you’ve lived with for a decade, the friends who were your actual family, or the causes you cared about.
A will also designates an executor — the person responsible for administering your estate, filing your final tax return, paying remaining debts, and distributing assets to beneficiaries. Without a named executor, the court appoints one — which may be someone you wouldn’t have chosen and who doesn’t know your wishes or relationships. The executor role involves real work and real responsibility, and choosing someone who is organised, trustworthy, and willing to take it on makes the process meaningfully better for your beneficiaries.
The Guardian Decision: The Most Important Reason for Parents to Have a Will
For parents of minor children, the guardian designation in a will is arguably more important than any financial provision. If both parents die without naming a guardian, the court decides who raises your children — potentially relatives you’d have chosen, or relatives you’d absolutely not have chosen, or a contested custody dispute between competing family members. The court’s decision will be based on its assessment of the children’s best interests, which may or may not align with your values, relationships, and knowledge of your own family dynamics. The discomfort of having the guardian conversation and putting it in writing is genuinely small compared to the alternative of leaving this decision to a probate judge who doesn’t know your children or your family.
Guardian designations also involve practical financial planning: a will can establish a testamentary trust that holds assets for children until they reach an age you specify — 25 or 30, for example — rather than having an 18-year-old inherit a lump sum outright. The guardian manages the child’s care; the trustee manages the financial assets for the child’s benefit. These roles can be held by the same person or by different people, depending on your assessment of who is best suited to each responsibility.
What a Will Doesn’t Control
A common and costly misunderstanding about wills is that they control all of your assets at death. They don’t — many significant assets pass entirely outside your will through beneficiary designations or joint ownership, regardless of what your will says. Retirement accounts (401(k)s, IRAs), life insurance policies, and annuities pass to the named beneficiaries on the account regardless of will provisions. If your IRA beneficiary designation names your ex-spouse from a marriage that ended fifteen years ago, your ex-spouse receives the IRA proceeds even if your will says otherwise. Bank accounts held jointly with right of survivorship pass to the surviving joint owner. Real estate held as joint tenants with right of survivorship passes to the surviving owner.
This means that a complete estate plan involves both a will and a systematic review of all beneficiary designations on financial accounts, insurance policies, and jointly held assets. Many estates are significantly misdirected not because no will existed but because beneficiary designations were never updated after marriage, divorce, the birth of children, or the death of a previously named beneficiary. Reviewing and updating beneficiary designations is a separate but equally important task that a will alone doesn’t address.
Probate: What It Is and Whether to Avoid It
Assets that pass through your will go through probate — the court-supervised process of validating the will, paying debts and taxes, and distributing the remaining assets to beneficiaries. Probate is public (the will and inventory of assets become public record), can take months to years in complex or contested estates, and involves court and legal fees that reduce the estate available to beneficiaries. For simple estates in states with simplified probate procedures, the process may be relatively quick and inexpensive. In states with more burdensome probate processes, or for larger and more complex estates, the cost and delay of probate are real motivations to structure assets to pass outside the will through beneficiary designations, joint ownership, or living trusts.
How to Actually Get a Will Done
The most significant barrier to having a will is inertia rather than cost or complexity. For straightforward estates — married couples with children, simple asset structures, no business interests or unusual circumstances — online will-drafting services like Trust & Will, LegalZoom, and Willing provide legally valid documents at costs ranging from $100 to $200. These services are appropriate for genuinely simple situations and dramatically reduce the friction of getting a basic will in place. For more complex situations — blended families, significant assets, business interests, special needs beneficiaries, or significant charitable intentions — an estate planning attorney provides guidance that the online tools can’t, and the cost of $500 to $2,500 for a basic attorney-drafted estate plan is modest relative to the value of the assets and relationships being protected. Whichever route you choose, once drafted, a will must be properly signed and witnessed (and in many states, notarised) to be legally valid — the execution requirements vary by state and must be followed precisely.
Keeping It Current
A will written today may be outdated in five or ten years — after marriage, divorce, the birth of children, the death of named beneficiaries or executors, significant changes in financial circumstances, or moves to a different state with different estate laws. Major life events should trigger a will review and update. An annual review habit — checking beneficiary designations alongside the annual financial review described in other articles — ensures that estate documents stay current with your actual life circumstances rather than reflecting a situation that no longer exists. The will you write today is better than no will; a will that you update when life changes is better still.
Digital Estate Planning: The Part Most Wills Miss
Traditional estate planning focuses on physical and financial assets. A growing and often overlooked dimension is digital estate planning — what happens to your online accounts, digital assets, and digital footprint after death. Email accounts, social media profiles, cloud storage containing photos and documents, cryptocurrency holdings, domain names, online business accounts, and subscription services all require decisions that most wills don’t address. Some platforms have built-in legacy contact or memorialisation features — Facebook allows you to designate a legacy contact who can manage your profile after death, and Google’s Inactive Account Manager allows you to specify what happens to your account. Cryptocurrency holdings require specific planning: if private keys or seed phrases aren’t documented and accessible to your executor, the assets may be permanently inaccessible. Creating a digital asset inventory — a document listing your important online accounts, their access credentials, and your wishes for each — stored securely and accessible to your executor is a practical digital estate planning step that most people never take and that can save beneficiaries significant difficulty.
A basic estate plan — will, healthcare directive, and durable power of attorney — is one of the most important financial documents most adults don’t have. The cost and effort of creating one is genuinely low relative to the protection it provides, and the cost of dying without one falls entirely on the people you leave behind. Schedule the time, choose your approach (attorney or online service based on complexity), and treat the execution of your estate documents with the same priority you’d give any other financial task with significant consequences for the people you care about.
Think of estate planning not as a task for older people with significant wealth, but as a basic act of care for the people who will have to manage your affairs if something happens to you. A will, updated beneficiary designations, and a clear record of your digital assets and accounts is the minimum anyone with dependents or meaningful assets should have in place — and it’s genuinely achievable in an afternoon at modest cost.
