Both marriage and divorce can have major impacts on your life, but you may not realize that they can also affect the distribution of your assets after your death. A change in marital status can have an impact on the status of any will that was executed prior to that change. It is important to be aware of those effects in order to properly plan for them.
As stated in Part III of this series, generally marriage will completely revoke any will executed prior to that marriage. The reasoning is that once a person marries, it is assumed that he or she will want to execute a new will in order to include the spouse in the distribution of the estate. This automatic revocation can be avoided however, if the will is executed in anticipation of marriage and that anticipation is clearly stated in the will itself.
Unlike marriage, divorce does not completely revoke a will that was executed during the marriage. Instead, all mention of the former spouse is purged from the will and it is treated as if he or she predeceased the testator. Despite this automatic purging it is often suggested that the testator have a new will drafted at some point after the divorce in order to reflect changes in assets and intended beneficiaries.
Tags: asset protection, Estate Planning, probate, Wills, Wills series