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“I’m single, I don’t have kids — what would I even be planning?”
It is the most common reason single people skip this, and it has the logic exactly backwards. Marriage and children create built-in defaults. The law assumes a spouse can speak for you and assumes children should inherit from you. Remove both, and the defaults that remain are the ones you would least have chosen.
Renee Parris makes an unusually strong claim about this in Module 9: planning matters more when you are single, not less.
A Definition Worth Getting Right
The legal term for being single means you’ve never been married. Some people say I’m single and they’ve been divorced or they’re widowed, but the true definition of single is you’ve never yet been married.
This is not pedantry. Divorced and widowed people carry legal residue — former spouses still named on a retirement account, a decree that governs what happens to certain assets, a surviving-spouse status that affects how accounts transfer. Never-married is a genuinely different starting position, and it is the one this lesson addresses.
The Gap That Opens Tomorrow, Not at Death
Most of this conversation defaults to inheritance. The more urgent exposure is incapacity.
A married person who has a stroke has a spouse who will be recognized by most institutions as the natural first point of contact, and who in many cases has joint access to accounts already. It is not a substitute for a power of attorney — it is not — but it is a soft landing.
Without a spouse and without a durable power of attorney, nobody has standing. Not your mother. Not your brother. Not your best friend of twenty years. Your bills do not get paid, your investments do not get managed, and your medical decisions wait while someone petitions a probate court for guardianship or conservatorship.
That proceeding is public, costs real money, takes time you do not have, and ends with a judge deciding who gets control. You can prevent the whole thing with two signed documents.
Where Your Assets Actually Go
Die without a will or a trust and your state’s intestate succession statute distributes your estate. It is a fixed order of relatives, and it does not know anything about your life.
By death, just by law, if you die, who would those things pass to? So it’s always going to be, if you don’t designate who it’s going to be, it will be your next of kin. So if you have children, it’ll be your children. If you don’t have children, it will be your parents. If they’re already gone, it will be your siblings. If they’re already gone, nieces and nephews. So there is a tree, we call it the intestate line, and it differs a little state to state. But somebody will figure out what to happen to your assets.
For a single person with no children, that line usually runs to parents, then siblings, then nieces and nephews. Consider who that actually names in your case. It may be a sibling you have not spoken to in fifteen years. It will not be your partner of a decade, because unmarried partners are not on the list anywhere. It will not be the friend who drove you to chemotherapy. It will not be the organization you have given to every year since college.
The statute is not hostile. It is just blind, and blind defaults produce outcomes nobody would have chosen.
What You Get to Do Instead
For you to be able to make your own estate plan, then it gives you great freedom, great control to figure out who do you want it to go to.
This is the part Renee frames as opportunity rather than obligation, and she is right. A married couple with three children is working within strong expectations. A single person is not.
Some people say, I’m not married yet. I don’t have children. So maybe I’ll consider more charities. Maybe there are causes I believe in that if I didn’t need my money now, I would go ahead and support. I’ll support them in my death. Maybe it’s friends that don’t do as well financially as you do. Maybe you want to help them in your death. Maybe it’s a combination of the two.
Charitable giving at death, a friend who could use help, a niece’s education, a long-term partner who has no legal claim otherwise, or any mix of those. You are not constrained by a family tree. You get to decide what the money was for.
The Documents That Matter Most
Durable financial power of attorney. The single most important document for an unmarried person. Names who manages your money if you cannot, and keeps you out of conservatorship court.
Healthcare power of attorney with a HIPAA release. Names who makes medical decisions, and — critically — authorizes doctors to actually talk to them. The authority is useless without the information.
A will or a revocable living trust. The will directs distribution through probate. The trust directs distribution privately, without probate at all.
For singles, a trust is often worth the extra cost, for a reason specific to this situation: probate is a public filing. If your plan leaves significant assets to a friend, a partner, or a charity rather than to your next of kin, probate publishes that decision — and gives the relatives who were passed over a court already in session in which to object. A trust keeps it private and gives a disappointed relative nothing to walk into.
Beneficiary designations. Retirement accounts, life insurance, payable-on-death bank accounts, transfer-on-death brokerage accounts. These override your will and pass outside probate entirely. Name a primary and a contingent on every one of them, and check them whenever your life changes. A beneficiary form from 2009 does not know who you are now.
“My Situation Might Change”
That is the usual reason to wait, and it is also an argument for not waiting.
It also allows once your plan is established, it’s very simple to adapt it. If you should become married, right? If that event happens in your life, whatever the situation is, you can make that change very easily.
A revocable trust is revocable. A will can be amended. These documents are built to be edited, and amending one costs a fraction of what the original drafting cost. Meanwhile, the gap between today and your hypothetical future plan is the window in which the state’s version applies.
Plan for the life you have. Revise when it changes.
Start Here
- Sign a durable financial power of attorney. If you do one thing, do this.
- Sign a healthcare power of attorney with explicit HIPAA authorization, and name a backup.
- Look up your state’s intestate succession order and find out exactly who inherits if you do nothing. That usually settles the question.
- Pull up every beneficiary designation you have and confirm both the primary and the contingent are current.
- Decide whether privacy matters enough to warrant a trust over a will. If your plan departs from your family tree, it probably does.
So just, again, because you’re single doesn’t mean that you don’t need an estate plan. I would almost argue that it is as important, if not more important, than other marital statuses.
This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or financial advice. Intestate succession statutes, guardianship and conservatorship procedures, and the recognition of unmarried partners vary significantly by state. Consult a licensed estate planning attorney in your state to address your own circumstances.
About the instructor: Renee Parris is an estate planning educator with over 30 years of experience. This article is a companion piece to Renee’s course, Estate Planning, Simplified.
