A will drafted fifteen years ago named a guardian for children who are now adults, set up a trust structure designed around a family situation that’s since changed considerably, and divided assets based on a net worth and a set of relationships that may bear only a passing resemblance to the current reality. Nobody updated it — not out of negligence exactly, but because a will has an unusual property among important documents: it feels finished the moment it’s signed, and “finished” documents rarely prompt a reason to revisit them, right up until the day they’re actually needed and turn out to be answering questions from a version of the family that no longer exists.
Why a Will Feels Done in a Way Other Plans Don’t
Most ongoing financial plans get revisited naturally, because their own mechanics force periodic attention — a budget gets checked monthly, an investment portfolio gets reviewed as balances move, an insurance policy comes up for renewal on a schedule. A will has no equivalent built-in prompt. Once signed, it sits in a drawer or a digital file, doing nothing and requiring nothing, for as long as its owner is alive. This absence of any natural trigger to revisit it is exactly why wills are among the most commonly outdated important documents a family holds — not because updating them is difficult, but because nothing in the ordinary rhythm of life ever specifically calls attention to the fact that an update might be needed.
What Actually Tends to Drift Out of Date
The specific ways a will goes stale are fairly predictable across most families. Guardianship provisions written for young children become irrelevant once those children reach adulthood, but the outdated provision often simply remains in the document, unused and unremoved. Asset distributions calculated against an estate’s value at the time of drafting can become badly mismatched if that value has grown substantially, or shrunk, or simply changed in composition since then. Named executors or trustees may have moved away, become estranged, developed health issues of their own, or in some cases predeceased the will’s author entirely, leaving a document that names someone no longer able to serve in the role. Family structure itself often changes — a divorce, a remarriage, a new child, an estrangement — none of which update a will automatically simply because they happened.
Why Nobody Notices Until It Matters
Because none of these changes affect anything while the will’s author is alive and well, the mismatch between the document and current reality tends to go completely unnoticed for years, sometimes decades. The will only gets read closely again after death, at which point any outdated provisions are no longer simply outdated — they’re actively controlling how an estate gets distributed, potentially in ways the deceased would have changed immediately if they’d only thought to look at the document again during their lifetime. This is precisely the cruelty of a stale will: the person best positioned to notice and fix the problem is no longer available by the time the problem becomes consequential.
What a Reasonable Review Schedule Looks Like
Rather than treating a will as a document reviewed only when something dramatic prompts it, a more reliable approach ties review to a simple recurring schedule — checking the document every three to five years regardless of whether anything obvious has changed, specifically because the changes worth catching are often gradual rather than sudden, and a fixed schedule catches drift that no single triggering event would have prompted on its own. This should be supplemented by an immediate review after any major life event — a marriage, a divorce, a significant change in net worth, the death or incapacity of a named executor or guardian, or a child reaching adulthood — but the recurring schedule matters precisely because plenty of consequential drift happens without any single dramatic event marking it clearly.
What This Actually Requires
A periodic will review doesn’t need to be an extensive undertaking each time — often it’s a short conversation with an estate planning attorney confirming that the document still reflects current family circumstances, current asset levels, and current preferences about who should serve in each named role. The investment required to catch an outdated provision early is genuinely minor compared to the cost of that same provision surfacing, unnoticed and uncorrectable, at the exact moment it’s finally put into effect.