Major Life Changes And Your PA Will

If you are in the situation where you have recently married, have divorced, or had a child or children, you need to consider how this life change will affect your will. If you have a will in place prior to any of these events happening, it is important to understand how this changes your will and how you may want to speak with an attorney in order to have your Pennsylvania will revised. You want to make sure that the persons of your choosing are always being provided for in your will on any given day.

If you have named your spouse as a beneficiary in your will and you later become divorced in Pennsylvania, then the provisions in that Will are automatically revoked. However, these provisions are not automatically revoked if there is an indication in your will that the specific provisions related to your spouse were intended to survive divorce. This means that it is usually in the Testator’s best interest to have a new will drafted upon divorce to ensure that any provisions related to their ex-spouse are revoked and they can reassess who they would like to leave their estate and assets to upon death.

If the Testator gets married after the will is made, the surviving spouse shall receive the share of the estate that they would receive if the Testator died intestate (or without a will). This means that if you currently have a will in place and then you subsequently get married, you will want to revise your existing will to include your new spouse and provide them with the portion of your estate that you would like them to have.

If the Testator has biological children or adopts children after making the will, this is another situation where it is likely in the Testator’s best interest to revise the will to include specific provisions for that child if the Testator intends to provide that child with something specific. If the will is not revised in this situation, then that child receives their intestate share of the Testator’s estate (assuming that leaving that child out of the will in the first place was not intentional).