What to include in your will comes down to four jobs the document is built to do: name an executor to carry out your instructions, nominate a guardian for any minor children, direct who gets your probate property, and give your executor authority over harder-to-reach assets like digital accounts and pets. What to leave out matters just as much, because a will cannot override beneficiary designations on retirement accounts or life insurance, and it cannot redirect property held in joint tenancy. Getting that boundary right is the difference between a plan that works and one that sends your family into court over assets your will never had authority to distribute.
Name an Executor
Your executor is the person or institution responsible for carrying out the will’s instructions.1Legal Information Institute. Executor The role is a fiduciary one, meaning your executor owes a legal duty to act in the estate’s best interests, not their own.2American Bar Association. Guidelines for Individual Executors and Trustees
The job involves more work than most people expect. Your executor files the will with the probate court, locates and protects estate assets, notifies creditors, pays outstanding debts and final bills, files income and estate tax returns, and distributes what remains to your beneficiaries.2American Bar Association. Guidelines for Individual Executors and Trustees This process routinely takes a year or more for estates of any complexity, and the executor is accountable to both the beneficiaries and the court for every transaction.
Pick someone organized, financially responsible, and willing to serve. Have the conversation before you finalize your will. Always name an alternate in case your first choice can’t serve or declines.
Most states allow executors to collect compensation. Some set fees as a percentage of the estate’s value, often starting around 5% on the first portion and declining as the estate gets larger. Others leave it to the probate judge to determine reasonable compensation based on how much work the estate required. Your will can specify the executor’s fee, and courts generally honor that provision. An executor can also waive compensation entirely, which sometimes makes tax sense when the executor is also a beneficiary, since executor fees are taxable income while inheritances generally are not.
Nominate a Guardian for Minor Children
If you have children under 18, your will is the primary tool for naming who should raise them if both parents die. Without a guardian nomination, a court decides based on its own assessment of the child’s best interests, and the judge may not pick the person you would have chosen. Your nomination carries significant weight and is typically honored unless the court finds the person unfit.
Think carefully about who shares your values and parenting approach, and who has the practical capacity to take on children. Talk to your candidate first. Guardian duties are enormous, and surprising someone with that responsibility after your death creates problems for everyone. Name at least one backup.
You can split the guardian role into two separate appointments. A guardian of the person handles day-to-day care and makes decisions about the child’s health, education, and welfare. A guardian of the estate manages whatever money or property the child inherits. Separating these roles lets you pick the best caregiver even if that person isn’t great with finances, while giving a financial guardian accountability to the court through regular accountings of how the money is spent. If you leave children both a loving caretaker and significant assets, the split is worth serious consideration.
Distribute Your Property
Property distribution is the core of most wills. You have three main tools, and understanding the differences matters because of what happens when the estate can’t cover every gift.
A specific bequest identifies a particular item and a particular recipient: “my antique pocket watch to my nephew John Smith.”3Legal Information Institute. Specific Bequest These gifts get fulfilled first, as long as the item is still in your estate when you die. If you sold the watch before your death, the gift fails through a doctrine called ademption, and John gets nothing in its place unless your will provides an alternative. This catches people off guard, especially with real estate that gets sold or refinanced during the testator’s lifetime.
A general bequest is typically a dollar amount, like “$10,000 to my sister,” paid from the estate’s overall assets rather than tied to any specific property. Because it draws from the general pool, it doesn’t fail if any particular asset is gone.
The residuary clause catches everything else. After specific and general bequests are fulfilled and debts, taxes, and administrative expenses are paid, the residuary clause directs where the remaining property goes.4Legal Information Institute. Residuary Estate This is arguably the most important provision in your will, because it handles the bulk of most estates and automatically covers any property you acquire after writing the will. Without one, leftover assets pass under your state’s intestacy laws as if you never wrote a will at all.
When an estate doesn’t have enough to cover every gift after debts, bequests get reduced in a priority order called abatement. Residuary gifts are cut first, then general bequests, then specific bequests. The specific items you earmark are the most protected, and whoever receives the residuary estate absorbs the first hit.
Disinheritance and No-Contest Language
You can disinherit children, siblings, and extended family, but you need to do it explicitly. Simply leaving someone out is not enough. Most states have pretermitted heir statutes that give a share of the estate to children born or adopted after the will was signed if they aren’t mentioned at all, because the law assumes the omission was an oversight. Even children who existed when the will was written can argue that being left out was accidental.
The safest approach is blunt language: “I intentionally make no provision for my son [Name].” That one sentence eliminates ambiguity and makes a successful challenge dramatically harder. If you want to explain your reasoning, do it in a separate letter rather than in the will, where explanations can create ammunition for a contest.
Spouses are a different story. In the roughly 40 states with common law property rules, a surviving spouse has an elective share, meaning the right to claim a portion of the estate regardless of what the will says. The exact percentage varies by state. In the nine community property states, each spouse already owns half of everything acquired during the marriage, so your will can only direct your half. Attempting to disinherit a spouse without understanding these rules leads to litigation your estate will lose.
A no-contest clause threatens to strip any beneficiary who challenges the will of their inheritance. If your sister is set to receive $100,000 but files a lawsuit claiming the will is invalid, the clause triggers and she gets nothing. Most states enforce these clauses, though many carve out an exception for contests brought with probable cause, meaning the challenger had a reasonable factual basis for believing the will was defective. The practical limitation is that the clause only works against people who stand to inherit something. A person left nothing has nothing to lose by challenging the will. Some estate planners suggest leaving a modest gift to anyone you expect might cause trouble, so the clause has something to take away. Florida does not enforce no-contest clauses at all, so residents there need alternative strategies.
Pets and Digital Assets
Pets are legally personal property. They cannot inherit money or assets, and any attempt to leave property directly to an animal will fail.5Animal Legal and Historical Center. Wills and Trusts – Pet Animals: What Happens When Their Humans Die? The simplest approach is to leave your pet to a trusted person along with a sum of money and a request that the funds cover food and veterinary care. But the recipient isn’t legally required to spend the money on the animal, so this method relies entirely on good faith.
For enforceable protection, set up a pet trust. All 50 states and the District of Columbia now authorize them.6Animal Legal and Historical Center. Map of States With Companion Animal Pet Trust Laws A pet trust lets you appoint a trustee to manage the funds and a separate caretaker for daily care. Unlike a simple bequest, the trustee has a legal obligation to spend the money on the animal, and a court can enforce that duty. Name a backup caretaker.
Cryptocurrency, online financial accounts, social media profiles, email archives, domain names, digital photo libraries, and intellectual property stored online are easy to overlook. Without instructions, your executor may not know these assets exist, let alone have the passwords or legal authority to access them.
Create a digital asset inventory that lists your accounts, login credentials, and what you want done with each one — transferred, closed, memorialized, or deleted. Store this inventory somewhere secure and tell your executor where to find it. Do not put passwords directly in your will, because it becomes a public document once filed with the probate court.
Most states have adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which gives executors legal authority to manage a deceased person’s digital accounts.7Uniform Law Commission. Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, Revised But many online providers have their own terms of service that restrict access, and some platforms honor only the user’s own account settings for post-death management. Explicitly granting your executor authority over digital assets in your will strengthens their position when dealing with resistant companies.
What to Leave Out
A will only controls assets that pass through probate. Several types of property transfer automatically through other legal mechanisms, and your will cannot override them. Any conflict gets resolved in favor of the other arrangement.
Retirement accounts and life insurance policies pass directly to whoever you named as beneficiary on the account paperwork. That beneficiary designation controls who gets the money, not your will, not your trust, and not your most recently expressed wishes at a family dinner. The same is true for payable-on-death designations on bank accounts and transfer-on-death designations on brokerage accounts. The named beneficiary collects by presenting a death certificate, with no probate involvement.
Real estate or financial accounts held as joint tenants with right of survivorship automatically transfer to the surviving owner when one owner dies.8Legal Information Institute. Joint Tenancy Your will cannot redirect that property. Joint tenancy is a common strategy for married couples, but it has real drawbacks: the surviving owner gains full control with no obligation to follow your wishes, and the property still goes through probate when the last owner dies. Adding a non-spouse as a joint tenant can also trigger gift tax consequences and exposes your property to that person’s creditors.
Funeral and burial instructions are one of the most common items people put in their wills that shouldn’t be there. The problem is timing. Wills are often not located or read until days or weeks after death, long past the point when funeral decisions need to be made. Put these wishes in a separate letter of intent that your executor and close family members can access immediately. A letter of intent isn’t legally binding, but it provides clear guidance during a period when your family is grieving and making decisions under pressure.
Conditions on gifts that violate public policy also won’t survive a court challenge. You can attach reasonable conditions to bequests — “to my daughter when she turns 25” is fine. But conditions requiring a beneficiary to marry or divorce a specific person, change their religion, or do something illegal are generally struck down, and the gift passes without the condition attached.
The single biggest mistake in this area is forgetting to keep beneficiary designations in sync with your will. An outdated beneficiary form on a 401(k) can send hundreds of thousands of dollars to an ex-spouse even though your will leaves everything to your current partner. Review every beneficiary designation whenever you update your will.
Make Sure It’s Valid
Before worrying about what goes inside, make sure your will will actually hold up. In nearly every state, a valid will must satisfy four requirements. It must be in writing; oral wills are not recognized in the vast majority of states. You must sign it yourself, or direct someone to sign in your presence and at your direction. At least two disinterested adults — people who won’t inherit anything under the will — must watch you sign and then sign the document themselves. And you must have testamentary capacity: you understand what property you own, know who your close family members are, and grasp what it means to leave property to specific people.
You generally must be at least 18, though a few states allow younger people to make a will if they’re married or serving in the military. Your witnesses should be unrelated to you by blood or marriage and should not be named as beneficiaries or fiduciaries. If a witness does stand to inherit, some states void only that person’s gift rather than invalidating the entire will, but it creates unnecessary risk.
About half the states also recognize holographic wills — handwritten, unwitnessed documents signed by the person making the will. Even where they’re valid, holographic wills invite challenges because no witnesses can confirm you wrote it voluntarily and with a clear mind.9Legal Information Institute. Holographic Will Requirements vary. Some states demand the entire document be in your handwriting, while others require only that the signature and material portions be handwritten. If you can afford a properly witnessed and typed will, a holographic one is not worth the risk.
Attach a self-proving affidavit. This notarized statement from you and your witnesses confirms the will was properly executed. Without it, the probate court may need to track down your witnesses after your death to verify their signatures, which is a problem if they’ve moved, become incapacitated, or died. Nearly every state accepts self-proving affidavits.
Keep It Current
Life changes, and your will should keep pace. Marriage, divorce, new children, major asset purchases, a move to a different state — any of these should trigger a review.
For minor updates like swapping an executor, adjusting a dollar amount, or correcting a name, a codicil works. A codicil is a separate document that amends specific provisions of your existing will while leaving the rest intact. It must be signed and witnessed with the same formality as the original. Codicils create risk when they pile up, because a second or third amendment layered onto an aging will can produce conflicting instructions that invite litigation. For anything substantial, draft a new will that opens with a clause revoking all prior wills and codicils.
You can also revoke a will by physically destroying it — tearing, burning, or shredding — with the clear intent to revoke.10Legal Information Institute. Revocation of Wills by Instrument If someone else destroys it at your direction and in your presence, that also works in most states. But physical destruction without a replacement means you die intestate, so only destroy a will when a new one is already signed and witnessed.
Divorce automatically revokes provisions benefiting your former spouse in most states. Gifts, executor appointments, and guardian nominations are all treated as if your ex-spouse predeceased you. The automatic rule does not reach every asset. Beneficiary designations on retirement accounts, life insurance, and POD/TOD accounts need to be updated manually. Relying on the automatic revocation alone is one of the more expensive mistakes in estate planning.