How to write a will: the seven decisions
A will is not a document you write. It is seven decisions you make, and then a document that records them. Here they are, in the order they are easiest to answer.
Almost nobody stalls on a will because the paperwork is hard. They stall because the paperwork asks questions they have never sat down and answered, and answering them in a lawyer’s office on the clock is the worst possible setting for it.
So do the answering first. Every one of these seven has a default answer if you leave it blank, decided by your state rather than by you. None of them takes longer than a conversation over dinner.
1. Who administers the estate
Your executor gathers what you owned, pays what you owed, and passes on the rest. It is an administrative job rather than an honour, and it usually runs for months: paperwork, institutions, and a lot of phone calls.
Pick the organised one, not the eldest one. Then name an alternate, because an executor who has died, moved abroad or simply declines leaves your estate with no named administrator at all. Naming a single executor with no backup is the most common omission we see.
2. Who raises your children
If you have children under eighteen this is the most consequential paragraph you will ever sign, and a will is the only place it can be recorded. A guardian appointment carries substantial weight with a court, though a court retains its own duty to consider the child’s interests.
Ask the person first. Nobody can be compelled to serve, so an appointment the appointee declines is an empty one. Then name an alternate and tell them too.
3. Who manages what the children inherit
This is a separate job from raising them, and separating the two is the single most useful thing in this guide. The sibling who would be a wonderful parent to your children is not automatically the person you would hand a lump sum to invest for fifteen years.
Money left outright to a minor is normally released in full at the age of majority, which in most states is eighteen. Eighteen is a legal threshold, not a readiness one. A children’s trust inside your will lets you say twenty five instead, or stage it, and lets the money be spent on school and health in the meantime.
4. Who receives what
Start with the specific gifts that matter: the guitar to the nephew who plays it, the ring to the person who has always assumed it was theirs. These are small in value and large in meaning, and they are the items families actually fall out over.
Then the residuary estate, which is everything else. Say where it goes in percentages rather than amounts, because an amount written in 2026 will be the wrong proportion of your estate by 2040.
5. What happens if a beneficiary dies first
The question nobody expects and everybody should answer. If you leave a quarter to each of four children and one of them dies before you, does their share pass to their children or split between their siblings?
Per stirpes means it passes down their line. The alternative splits it among the survivors. Two words, and they decide whether your grandchildren inherit.
6. How it gets signed
This is where wills actually fail, and it has nothing to do with the wording. Your state sets how many witnesses are required and who is disqualified from being one, and in most states a beneficiary should not witness the will they benefit from.
Most states require witnesses rather than a notary for the will itself. A notary usually appears on the self proving affidavit, a short attachment in which your witnesses swear to what they saw. It is optional in most states and worth doing, because without it your executor may have to track those witnesses down years later.
7. Where the signed copy lives
A will nobody can find does nothing. Tell your executor where the signed original is, and keep a scanned copy somewhere they can reach without your password.
And put a date in the calendar to reread it. A will signed once and never revisited describes a family that no longer exists: an executor who moved, an account that closed, a guardian who now has three children of her own.
Legacy Buddy provides document creation tools, not legal advice. Where a situation needs a professional, the platform says so.
What to take from this
- Answer the seven questions before you open any document tool, including ours
- Name an alternate for every single role
- Guardian and trustee are two jobs and often two people
- Percentages age better than amounts
- How it is witnessed matters more than how it is worded
Knowing what to do is the hard part. This is the easy part.
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