The short answer
A divorce ends a marriage. It does not go through your files and rewrite your documents. Your will, your trust, your powers of attorney, and every beneficiary form you have ever signed still say whatever they said the day you signed them.
Some states automatically cancel gifts to a former spouse in a will once the divorce is final. Those rules differ by state and they do not cover everything, so treating them as a backstop is a bad plan. Check your state's requirements to see what applies where you live. Replacing the documents is cheap, fast, and certain.
Start with the documents that work while you are alive
Most estate planning conversations start with the will. After a divorce, start somewhere else. Your financial power of attorney and your healthcare power of attorney give another person authority today, not after your death, and in a typical married plan that person is your spouse.
Until you sign new ones, your former spouse may still be the person a bank or a hospital turns to. That is usually the first thing people want changed, and it is the easiest thing to change.
- Financial power of attorney: revoke the old one in writing and sign a new one naming someone else
- Healthcare power of attorney and living will: same, and give a copy to your doctor and to the new agent
- HIPAA authorization: make sure your new agent, not your former spouse, can get your medical information
- Tell the institutions that hold an old copy on file, because they act on what they have
Estateur's POA Package is $79 individual and $119 for a couple. A financial power of attorney on its own is $49 and a healthcare power of attorney is $59, which includes the living-will directive and the HIPAA authorization. Background on how powers of attorney work is worth reading first.
Then the beneficiary forms
This is where most post-divorce mistakes live. Retirement accounts, life insurance policies, annuities, and payable-on-death bank accounts pass by the form on file, not by your will and not by your settlement agreement. If the form still says your former spouse, the company pays your former spouse.
Divorce settlements sometimes require you to keep a former spouse as beneficiary on a policy, usually to secure support obligations. Check your decree before changing anything, then change everything the decree does not require you to keep.
- List every account: employer retirement plans, old retirement accounts from prior jobs, IRAs, life insurance, annuities, brokerage and bank accounts with a payable-on-death or transfer-on-death instruction
- Read what your divorce decree requires you to keep in place
- Submit new primary and contingent beneficiaries on everything else
- Avoid naming minor children directly; use a trust or a custodial arrangement so an adult manages the money
- File the written confirmations with your signed estate planning documents
Old employer retirement accounts are the most commonly forgotten. If you have changed jobs more than twice, assume there is a form out there you have not looked at.
Rewrite the will
A new will does three things at once: it revokes the old one, it removes your former spouse as a beneficiary and as executor, and it lets you name new people for both roles.
If you have minor children, this is also where you nominate a guardian. That nomination is worth thinking about carefully after a divorce. In most cases, the other legal parent will have custody if you die, so your nomination matters most in the situations where that parent cannot serve. Name someone anyway, and name an alternate. There is more on how to name a guardian.
If you have a trust
A revocable living trust you created alone can usually be amended or restated, and after a divorce a full restatement is often cleaner than a patch, because a restatement replaces the whole document instead of layering amendments on top of each other.
A joint trust created by both spouses is different. Joint trusts have their own rules about how and when either person can change them, and those rules are written into the document itself. If you have a joint trust, read what it says about revocation and talk to an attorney before acting. That is one of the genuine attorney moments in a divorce.
Titles, deeds, and the practical cleanup
Estate planning documents are only half the job. The way property is titled controls where it goes, and joint ownership with right of survivorship passes to the surviving owner no matter what your will says.
Work through the list once, deliberately. It is tedious and then it is finished.
- Real estate deeds: make sure the title matches what the divorce awarded
- Joint bank and brokerage accounts: close, retitle, or remove the former owner
- Safe deposit boxes and the people authorized to open them
- Digital accounts, password managers, and cloud storage where a former spouse may still have access
- Emergency contacts on file with employers, schools, and medical offices
For the accounts that live only online, our walkthrough of digital assets and estate planning covers how to inventory and hand off access.
An example of how this goes wrong
Priya divorced in her thirties and remarried five years later. She updated her will after the second marriage and felt finished. She never touched the 401(k) from her first job, where the form still named her first husband.
When Priya died, the plan paid the account to her first husband. Her second husband had a valid will in hand that said otherwise, and it did not matter, because the will never controlled that account. The whole problem could have been fixed with a ten-minute form.
Doing it in one sitting
Most people can replace a full set of documents in an evening. Estateur walks you through a quiz, then a guided interview, then gives you documents to print and sign with signing instructions written for your state. Start your plan, and see what signing day looks like.
One caution worth repeating: Estateur is a self-help document preparation service, not a law firm, and using it does not create an attorney-client relationship. If your divorce is still pending, if there is a court order restricting what you can change, or if a joint trust or a family business is in the picture, get advice from an attorney in your state before you sign anything.