A solid will checklist covers six things: the people you name, how your assets are directed, the property that passes outside the will entirely, the formal signing requirements in your state, protection against future challenges, and a plan for storing and updating the document. Miss any one and your family can face delays, extra cost, or an outcome you never intended. If you die without a valid will, a probate court divides your property under a rigid statutory formula that ignores your relationships and your wishes, and a judge who has never met your family decides who raises your minor children.
People Your Will Needs to Name
Start with yourself. The will should open with your full legal name, any other names you’re known by, and your legal residence. If you own property in more than one state, your state of residence determines which probate court handles the will and which law governs it.
Executor and Alternate
Your executor gathers your assets, pays debts and taxes, and distributes what’s left. Pick someone organized, trustworthy, and willing to deal with paperwork, financial institutions, and difficult family dynamics. Most people choose a spouse, adult child, or close friend; an attorney or corporate trustee is also an option.
Two things people routinely skip. Name an alternate executor in case your first choice can’t or won’t serve. And grant your executor broad administrative powers directly in the will. Without explicit authorization, an executor may need court approval for routine tasks like selling real estate, managing investments, or hiring professionals, which costs the estate time and money.
Guardian for Minor Children
If you have children under 18, name a guardian and an alternate. A will is the only document where you can do this, and courts generally honor the nomination unless there’s a compelling reason not to. Pick for shared values and parenting approach, not just willingness, and talk with your chosen guardian before you sign so no one is caught off guard.
Beneficiaries and Contingent Beneficiaries
Use full legal names for every person or organization you want to receive something. Vague descriptions like “my nieces” invite disputes when there are step-nieces, half-nieces, or nieces by marriage. For each primary beneficiary, name a contingent beneficiary who takes the gift if the primary dies before you. Without that backup, a lapsed gift falls into the residuary estate or passes under intestacy rules, and neither may match what you wanted.
Directing Where Your Assets Go
Specific Gifts
A specific gift is a particular item or sum going to a particular person: the engagement ring to your daughter Sarah, $10,000 to your brother James. Be precise. If you own two cars, say which one. If you’re leaving a dollar amount, say whether it comes from a named account or from the estate generally.
The Residuary Estate
After specific gifts, debts, and taxes, everything left over is your residuary estate. The will needs to say who gets it. This is the catch-all, and it matters more than most people realize: assets you acquire after signing, items you forgot to bequeath, and property that falls back because a beneficiary predeceased you all flow through this clause. Name residuary beneficiaries and alternates so leftover assets don’t pass under intestacy law.
Debts and Taxes
Your will can direct how debts and taxes are paid. Without instructions, state law determines the order in which categories of assets are used to satisfy obligations, a process called abatement, and it can consume specific gifts you intended for loved ones. You might specify that debts be paid from a particular account, or that a mortgage on inherited property be paid from the estate rather than passed to the heir. The same logic applies to estate taxes.
Assets Your Will Won’t Control
A significant portion of what you own probably bypasses your will no matter what the will says. These non-probate assets transfer automatically at your death, and your will has no power to override them.
- Beneficiary designations on life insurance, 401(k)s, IRAs, and bank accounts with payable-on-death or transfer-on-death designations pass directly to whoever is named on the account. If your will leaves your IRA to your daughter but the beneficiary form still names your ex-spouse, your ex-spouse gets the IRA.
- Real estate or accounts held as joint tenants with right of survivorship, or as tenants by the entirety for married couples, pass automatically to the surviving co-owner.
- Property transferred into a revocable living trust during your lifetime is distributed according to the trust terms, not the will. If you have a trust, you typically also need a pour-over will that catches anything you forgot to move into the trust.
Review beneficiary designations and account titling at least as carefully as you draft the will. Outdated beneficiary forms are one of the most common reasons assets end up with the wrong person, and courts consistently hold that the designation on the account controls regardless of what the will says.
Provisions People Commonly Miss
Digital Assets
Your online accounts, cryptocurrency, digital photos, domain names, and social media profiles all need someone to manage them after your death. Nearly every state has adopted a version of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which gives your executor legal authority to access and manage digital accounts. The law creates a priority system: instructions you leave through a platform’s own tools (Google’s Inactive Account Manager, Facebook’s Legacy Contact) override your will. If you haven’t used those tools, your will’s instructions control. If the will is silent, the platform’s terms of service decide, which usually means the account is deleted or locked.
Include a provision authorizing your executor to access your digital accounts. Keep a separate, secure list of accounts and passwords and tell your executor where to find it. Don’t put passwords in the will itself, because wills become public documents during probate.
Pet Care
Pets can’t inherit property, but all 50 states and the District of Columbia now allow enforceable pet trusts. You can name a caregiver, name an alternate, and fund a trust to cover veterinary care, food, and other expenses for the animal’s lifetime. Money remaining when the pet dies typically goes to a beneficiary you designate or reverts to the residuary estate.
No-Contest Clause
A no-contest clause (sometimes called an in terrorem clause) says a beneficiary who challenges the will and loses forfeits their inheritance. It only deters challenges if the beneficiary stands to receive something meaningful under the will. Enforcement varies by state, and some jurisdictions won’t enforce the clause if the challenger had probable cause. If family conflict is a real concern, discuss this with an attorney.
Letter of Instruction
A letter of instruction isn’t legally binding, but it’s one of the most useful documents you can leave behind. It tells your executor and family where to find important documents, account numbers, insurance policies, passwords, and contact information for your attorney, financial advisor, and doctors. It can also carry personal wishes that don’t belong in a legal document, like funeral preferences, how to divide personal belongings among friends, or care instructions for pets. Funeral wishes in particular belong here rather than in the will, because wills often aren’t located and read until days or weeks after death, when funeral decisions have already been made. Update the letter at least once a year.
Making the Will Legally Valid
A will that doesn’t meet your state’s formal requirements is worthless no matter how clearly it states your wishes. The rules vary in detail, but the core requirements are consistent across most of the country.
Writing, Signature, and Witnesses
Your will must be in writing, typed or handwritten. You must sign it; some states require the signature at the end, others allow it anywhere on the page. At least two witnesses must sign in your presence or, in some states, after you acknowledge the document or your signature to them. Witnesses should not be beneficiaries. In many states, a beneficiary-witness doesn’t invalidate the whole will but can void the gift to that witness or create grounds for a challenge.
You also need testamentary capacity at signing. You must be at least 18 and understand what property you own, who your natural heirs are, and what the will does with your assets. Cognitive conditions like dementia can call capacity into question, which is one reason competent witnesses who can later testify to your mental state matter.
Self-Proving Affidavit
A self-proving affidavit is a notarized sworn statement, signed by you and your witnesses, attached to the will. It allows the probate court to accept the will as valid without requiring your witnesses to appear in court after your death. Most states allow self-proving affidavits, and including one can meaningfully speed up probate. A handful of jurisdictions don’t recognize them, so check your state’s rules.
Holographic and Electronic Wills
A holographic will is handwritten and signed by the testator with no witnesses. Some states accept them, some only in limited circumstances (like armed forces members during active duty), and some don’t recognize them at all. Even where allowed, they’re far more vulnerable to challenges over authenticity and capacity.
As of early 2026, roughly 15 states have enacted laws allowing electronic wills, which are created and signed digitally, typically with electronic signatures from the testator and witnesses (sometimes during a live video session) and secure digital storage. Most states still don’t recognize them. If you create an electronic will, confirm your state specifically authorizes it or the document may be unenforceable.
Protecting Against a Will Contest
A will contest is a legal challenge to a will’s validity. The four main grounds are:
- Lack of capacity: the challenger argues the testator didn’t understand what they were signing due to dementia, Alzheimer’s, or another condition.
- Undue influence: someone pressured the testator into changing or creating the will in a way they otherwise wouldn’t have, often a caregiver or someone who entered the testator’s life late.
- Fraud: the testator was deceived about the will’s contents, lied to about assets, or had their signature forged.
- Improper execution: the will wasn’t signed, witnessed, or notarized according to state law.
The best defenses are preventive. Have an attorney draft or review the document. Execute it with witnesses who can later testify you were clearheaded and acting freely. If you’re elderly or have a condition that someone might later use to question capacity, consider a doctor’s evaluation close to the signing date and keep that documentation. A self-proving affidavit and a no-contest clause add further layers.
What You Can’t Do: Disinherit a Spouse
In most states, you cannot completely disinherit a surviving spouse through a will. Spouses have the right to claim an “elective share” of the estate, typically around one-third, regardless of what the will provides. Even if your will leaves everything to your children or a charity, your spouse can petition the court for the statutory share. Community property states handle this differently, generally giving the surviving spouse automatic ownership of half the marital property. If limiting a spouse’s share is your goal, this is an area where legal counsel is essential, because the law is specifically designed to prevent it.
Storing, Updating, and Revoking
Where to Keep the Original
Store the original signed will somewhere safe and accessible. A fireproof home safe or your attorney’s office are common choices. Be cautious with safe deposit boxes: banks generally allow next of kin access under supervision after the owner’s death, but the process can take weeks and may require a court order, creating delays at exactly the wrong time. Wherever you store it, tell your executor the location. A will nobody can find is functionally no will at all.
The Revocation Clause
Every new will should contain a clause explicitly revoking all prior wills and codicils. Without this language, a court may try to reconcile conflicting provisions between your old and new wills, which invites confusion and litigation. Some states apply “implied revocation” where inconsistent later provisions override earlier ones, but relying on that is an unnecessary gamble.
When and How to Update
Review your will after any major life change: marriage, divorce, the birth or adoption of a child, a significant financial shift, the death of a beneficiary or executor, or a move to a different state. For minor changes like swapping an executor or adjusting a specific dollar amount, a codicil (a formal amendment, signed and witnessed the same way as the original) may be enough. For anything more substantial, a new will with a fresh revocation clause is cleaner. Informal changes like crossing out names or writing in the margins can invalidate provisions or the entire document.
Estate Tax Note
The federal estate tax exemption for 2026 is $15 million per person, or $30 million for a married couple, following passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Starting in 2027, the amount adjusts annually for inflation. The federal estate tax rate remains 40% on amounts above the exemption. For most estates, federal estate tax won’t be a concern. If your net worth approaches these thresholds, your will should work in coordination with trust planning and other strategies, and married couples should look into “portability,” which lets a surviving spouse use the deceased spouse’s unused exemption but requires a timely federal estate tax return election. Many states impose their own estate taxes with lower exemptions and no portability, so state-level planning may matter even when federal tax doesn’t.