Why You Need a Will - Even if you're married (and especially if you're getting divorced)
- Sean Fane
- Jul 24
- 5 min read
Over half of UK adults don't have a will....so if you're one of them, you're in good company, but that's not much consolation for the people you'd leave behind.
I get it.
As a former IT business owner, I know how easy it is to keep pushing "sort the will" down the priority list.
There's always something more urgent.
In fact, even when I started working as a financial adviser....I kept avoiding my own wills and LPA for ages.
I couldn't bear the thought of all the admin (and cost)....and that was fresh from a "surprise" heart attack that nearly killed me.
However, a will is one of those 'jobs' where the cost of delay isn't measured in missed deadlines, it's measured in what happens to the people you love when you're no longer around to help them.
Let me walk through three situations where I see this go wrong most often: assuming marriage protects you, assuming an old will still works, and, the one that catches
people out the most, going through a divorce without touching your will at all.
"But I'm married, doesn't my spouse just get everything?"
Not necessarily, and not automatically in the way most people assume.
If you die without a will, your estate is divided under the intestacy rules, not according to what you'd actually have wanted.
Your spouse doesn't simply inherit everything.
Under current rules, they receive your personal belongings, a statutory legacy of £322,000, and half of whatever's left, with the other half going to your children.
If your estate is worth more than that threshold, your children could inherit a share while your spouse is still living in, and dependent on, the family home.
And if you're not married - if you're cohabiting, however long you've been together, the position is much starker.
Unmarried partners inherit nothing under intestacy, regardless of how many years you've been together or whether you've raised children together.
There's no such thing as "common law marriage" in England and Wales.
Your partner would have to bring a claim under the Inheritance Act just to be considered, with no guarantee of the outcome.
There's also a second trap specific to marriage: if you already had a will before you got married, that will is automatically revoked the moment you marry, under Section 18 of the Wills Act 1837.
Unless you made a new one afterwards (or your existing will was specifically written "in contemplation of" that marriage), you may be treated as having no will at all, without ever realising it.
The divorce trap: your old will doesn't disappear - it just breaks
This is the one I want to spend the most time on, because I see it more often than almost anything else, and the consequences can be serious.
A common assumption is that divorce cancels your will.
It doesn't.
Your will remains fully valid...... right up until the point that it produces an outcome you never intended.
Once your Final Order (formerly known as the decree absolute) is granted, the law treats your former spouse as if they had died on that date, purely for the purposes of your will.
Any gift you left them fails.
Any appointment of them as executor or trustee falls away.
Everything else in the will (including gifts to other people) stays exactly as written.
That sounds tidy in principle, but in practice, it creates gaps most people never think to check:
If your former spouse was your main or sole beneficiary, and you named no one else, that portion of your estate has nowhere to go, it falls into intestacy, even though the rest of your will is technically still valid.
If your former spouse was your executor, and you didn't name a substitute, there may be no one legally appointed to administer your estate, adding delay and cost at the worst possible time for your family.
If you have children from the marriage, an outdated will may still reflect guardianship or trust arrangements that no longer make sense for your current circumstances.
Your Lasting Power of Attorney is affected too. If you'd appointed your spouse as your attorney, that appointment is revoked on divorce in the same way, so if you lose capacity before you've updated it, decisions about your welfare or finances may fall to someone else, or no one at all, until the Court of Protection gets involved.
None of this fixes itself.
The will keeps operating on autopilot, executing a plan that was built for a marriage that no longer exists.
I'd also flag the period before the Final Order is granted. Many people separate long before the paperwork catches up, sometimes years before.
Until that Final Order is issued, your spouse is still your spouse in the eyes of the law and your existing will, whatever you may have privately decided about the relationship.
What good practice actually looks like
None of this needs to be complicated, but it does need to be deliberate:
Write a will if you don't have one. Given more than half of UK adults are in this position, if this is you, you're not unusual..... but you are exposed.
Review it after any major life event - marriage, divorce, a new child, a house move, a business sale. Marriage revokes an old will outright; divorce quietly rewrites parts of it.
If you're separating, don't wait for the Final Order to think about your will. Update it - or at least review it - as soon as the separation is clear, not once the legal process has caught up.
Name substitute beneficiaries and executors, so a single life change doesn't leave a hole in your estate.
Check your Lasting Power of Attorney at the same time as your will. They're often overlooked together, and divorce affects both.
Why this matters more the more you've built
If you're an IT business owner or contractor, this isn't just about personal assets.
Business shares, shareholder agreements, pension arrangements and death-in-service benefits all interact with your will, and often with each other, in ways that aren't obvious until something goes wrong.
An outdated will doesn't just risk who inherits your house; it can affect who ends up with a stake in your business, or whether your intentions for it are honoured at all.
A will isn't a document you write once and file away.
It's a reflection of your circumstances as they stand today, and it's worth five minutes checking whether it still is.
Sean Fane is Principal of Fane Financial Services, a trading name of Corbel Partners Ltd, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 429142). This article is for general information only and does not constitute legal or financial advice. Will-writing and estate planning are not regulated by the FCA. Please seek advice specific to your circumstances before making decisions about your will or estate.
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