Other People's Lives Affect Your Death

Your death isn't the only death that affects your estate plans. Documents like wills and trusts are a team effort: wills have an executor, trusts have trustees, and both have inheritors or beneficiaries. And if any of those trustees, executors, or beneficiaries precede you in death, you'll have to update your documents.

Per our 2025 Caring Wills Survey, 24% of respondents have a will, and 13% have a living trust. Nearly a quarter of respondents have not touched or updated their estate plans since origination. This guide explores the ways other people's lives might influence your estate planning and what you can do to accommodate any changes.

Advance health care directives, or AHCDs, often encompass living wills, medical and nonmedical powers of attorney (POA), and organ donation. Most importantly, AHCDs help emergency medical teams know the types of care you do not want if you become incapacitated. According to the 2025 Caring Wills Survey, 28% of respondents have an AHCD.

Medical power of attorney often works alongside an AHCD, but not every U.S. state requires you to have both. Both documents come into play only when you're incapacitated, so you must have a proxy to ensure your wishes are carried out. That proxy, for obvious reasons, cannot be someone who preceded you in death. 

Two proxies can simultaneously hold power of attorney. If you're already updating your POA because your initial proxy passed away, it may be worth naming two proxies to succeed them. However, as proxies may disagree with each other about your wishes, you cannot name them equally. Name a proxy and then an alternate in your Power of Attorney document.

AHCD proxies don't have to be a spouse. Your proxy can be anyone you trust to implement your wishes (do you want to be on a ventilator, do you want to donate your organs, etc.). If you haven't reviewed your living will or medical power of attorney in a while, check your AHCD to make sure your chosen proxy is still alive and someone you trust.

Of our 2025 Wills Survey respondents, 23% hadn't touched their estate planning documents since origination. Beyond that, 11% of respondents had edited their estate documents within the past 10-15 years, and 4% reworked their wills over 15 years ago. 

The more time that passes since you created your will, the higher the likelihood you'll need to make updates. In the interim, some of the people you named in your estate documents may die before you, requiring you to change your will, trust, or advance health care directive to reflect their passing. 

If your executor or successor trustee passes away before you, you'd need to update your will or trust to include their appointed replacement. Our 2025 Caring Wills Survey shows that 10% of respondents had to update their estates after an executor or non-spouse beneficiary — which includes all other planned inheritors — passed away. If any of your beneficiaries precede you in death, you'll need to update your documents to divide your assets among the surviving heirs.

If you survive or divorce the spouse to whom you were planning to leave everything, you'd have to update your will to change your beneficiaries. Per the 2025 Wills Survey, 6% of respondents had to update their estates due to divorce, and 10% reported updating their wills or trusts because their spouse passed away before them.

Family expansion through birth or marriage ranked second among the most popular reasons people updated their wills in 2025. When you introduce a new member to your family through birth, adoption, or marriage, updating your estate to add them as a beneficiary is fairly common practice. But once they're in your will, you need to keep an eye on them.

Births, marriages, and divorces all necessitate updates to an estate plan. Births of children or grandchildren that occur after drawing up a will or trust can affect the estate plan's enforcement.

Sometimes, you may need to update your estate not because anyone died but because life can get messy. Your estate plans need to factor in anything from your surviving pets to a beneficiary's inability to accept your assets.

Adjusting for your inheritors can involve simple situations, like if you planned for a grumpy, combative pet to survive you and go live with a certain beneficiary. Still, the person to whom you bequeathed that pet can no longer take them in, requiring you to name a beneficiary better suited to rehoming that pet in the will or trust.

Sometimes, the situations are more complicated. Instability in an inheritor's life could also have an impact on your estate. If your inheritors' lives are affected by issues you don't think will resolve before your death, putting your money in a revocable trust instead of a will might be the way to go. 

Consider the following example: You plan to pass your house on to your child, but they're in school or traveling abroad and cannot manage the home right away. In this instance, you can place the house in a trust, and your successor trustee could distribute the house as an asset after your adult child can take on the asset. 

You can extrapolate this scenario to beneficiaries who are incarcerated during your death, make poor financial decisions, or even beneficiaries who are too young to manage the money you leave them at the time of your death. Successor trustees ensure your estate is disbursed according to your plans, even though you aren't around to call the shots.

Remember: Trusts are not only for wealthy people. Generally, if you own a house, you have enough assets to set up a trust. 

Any big life changes — good or bad — can influence your estate planning efforts. If you buy a house, sell a house, or lose a house, then your estate planning documents should address that change in assets.

Sometimes, you have to update your estate because you no longer retain the assets mentioned in it. According to the 2025 Wills Survey, 16% of respondents updated their wills or trusts to reflect a loss of assets. You can lose assets for many reasons, including repossession, divorce, a change in the stock market, or simply the weather. 

The Palisades and Eaton fires that consumed Southern California as we built the 2025 Wills Survey demonstrated the fragility of assets in real time. Many California homeowners no longer have some of the assets mentioned in their estate documents. 

Natural disasters are also a reminder that you should store your will or trust in a safety deposit box or have a digital copy or scan you can access. Rescuing your state planning documents may not be top of mind if you're obeying an evacuation order.

If you have an estate plan, check in on it regularly — especially if someone you named in your estate passes away before you. You'll also need to update your estate plan if you experience a change in assets, like the loss or gain of a house or stocks. Births, marriages, and divorces may also have an impact on your estate.