How Marriage or Civil Partnership Affects Your Will and What to Do About It...
Any pre-existing Will is cancelled when you get married. This means if you make a Will and then get married, that previously executed Will is revoked and therefore will not be used upon your death.
This means if you pass away with only having executed a Will prior to marriage, your estate will not be distributed in line with your wishes in your (now invalid) Will. Instead, it will be distributed in line with the Rules of Intestacy.
The Rules of Intestacy only provide for certain family members and therefore there is a risk that if you intended for friends or stepchildren or step-siblings to inherit, they will not under the intestacy rules. Depending on the size of your estate, this usually means that the majority of your assets will go to your spouse or civil partner.
For clarity, the same rules applies to civil partnerships so if you were to write a will and then enter into a civil partnership, that Will would be invalid as well.
How to avoid this issue?
There are two main ways to avoid your Will becoming invalid by marriage or civil partnership. Either you can write a new Will following your marriage or you can contain a provision in your Will when you are expecting to get married to avoid it being considered invalid.
You could simply write a new Will following your marriage and you would then be able to decide what provision to include in your 'new' Will – this may be the same as your previous Will or you can alter it to reflect your new circumstances.
Alternatively, you can make your Will in anticipation of your marriage or civil partnership, and we can ensure we include the appropriate clauses to ensure that the Will is seen to be made 'in contemplation of marriage/civil partnership' so that the Will does not become void.
