Estate planning · October 6, 2026 · 5 minute read

Where to start if you have no will or trust

About 60 percent of Gen X have no will or trust. That is not carelessness. It is a task with no deadline attached, which is the kind of task that never gets done.

Nothing forces the issue. No renewal notice arrives, no bill comes due, and the consequences land on people who are not in the room when you are deciding. So it waits.

Here is what waiting actually means, and the first few steps, two of which cost nothing and can be done this week.

What happens with no will

The state has one for you. Every state has intestacy statutes that determine who receives your property when you die without a will, and the order is fixed. It generally favors spouse and children, which sounds reasonable until you look at the details.

In North Carolina, a surviving spouse does not automatically inherit everything. When there are children, the estate is divided between the spouse and the children according to a statutory formula. A surviving spouse can end up sharing ownership of the family home with their own children, or with children from a prior marriage.

The sharper problem is guardianship. If both parents of a minor child die without naming a guardian, a court decides who raises that child. The court tries to act in the child's interest, but it is working without the one piece of information that matters most, which is what you would have wanted.

The document that overrides your will

This is the part that catches people, so it is worth stating plainly: beneficiary designations beat your will.

Your 401(k), IRA, and life insurance policies pass to whoever is named on the beneficiary form, regardless of what your will says. If your 401(k) from 2009 still names an ex-spouse, that is generally who receives it, and the will you signed last year does not change it.

Checking those forms costs nothing and takes an afternoon. It is the single highest-value thing most people can do about their estate, and almost nobody does it.

The will is the document everyone talks about. The beneficiary form is the document that actually moves the money.

Will or trust

A will directs who receives your property and names a guardian for minor children. It goes through probate, the court-supervised process of settling an estate, which in most cases is manageable but is public and takes time.

A revocable living trust holds assets you transfer into it during your life and passes them to your beneficiaries without probate. It also provides for management of those assets if you become incapacitated, which a will does nothing about. It costs more up front and only works for assets actually retitled into it, which is where most trusts fail in practice.

A trust is usually worth considering if you own property in more than one state, if you want privacy, if you have a child with a disability who receives benefits, or if you have a blended family where the default rules would produce a result you do not want. Plenty of households are well served by a will, properly drawn.

This is legal work and it belongs with an attorney. We are not attorneys and we do not draft these documents.

The first three steps

• Pull every beneficiary form. Retirement accounts, life insurance, annuities, and any transfer-on-death designation on a bank or brokerage account. Confirm the primary and the contingent. This is free and you can do it now.
• Decide on a guardian. If you have minor children, this is the most consequential decision on the list. Have the conversation with the person before you name them.
• Write down where everything is. One page: accounts, policies, the attorney if you have one, where the documents live. Tell one person it exists. Families routinely spend months finding things that were never hidden, only unmentioned.

How we fit into this

We handle the insurance side, which often intersects with estate questions: making sure beneficiaries are current and consistent with your intentions, and in larger estates arranging liquidity so heirs are not forced to sell an asset quickly to cover taxes or expenses.

The drafting goes to a partner attorney. We coordinate so the pieces agree with each other, because the common failure is not a missing document. It is a trust that says one thing and a beneficiary form that says another.