CONTRIBUTED CONTENT: Marriage, divorce, and your estate plan: What changes and when

Major life events call for a fresh look at your estate plan. Few events are more significant — or more commonly overlooked — than getting married or going through a divorce. Both can dramatically change who receives your assets, who makes decisions for you in a crisis, and whether your current documents reflect your actual wishes.

Here's what Idaho residents need to know about both.

When You Get Married

Marriage doesn't automatically update your estate plan. If you had a will before the wedding, it remains in effect — even if it leaves everything to someone other than your new spouse. If you had no will, Idaho's intestacy laws will determine how your estate is distributed, and those rules may not reflect what you want, especially in second marriages or when children from a prior relationship are involved.

Getting married is also the moment Idaho's community property rules begin to apply. Going forward, income earned and assets acquired during the marriage are generally community property — owned equally by both spouses, regardless of who earned the income or which name is on title. Assets you owned before the wedding remain your separate property, but the lines can blur quickly if those assets are commingled with marital funds.

After marriage, you'll want to review and likely update:

• Your will or trust, to include your spouse and reflect your new wishes

• Beneficiary designations on retirement accounts, life insurance, and bank accounts

• Powers of attorney, so your spouse can act on your behalf financially if needed

• Healthcare directives, to authorize your spouse to make medical decisions if you can't

If either spouse is bringing children from a prior relationship into the marriage, planning becomes more nuanced. Without careful structuring, a surviving spouse could ultimately inherit everything — leaving children from a previous relationship with nothing. A trust can provide for your spouse during their lifetime while ensuring your children receive what you intended.

When You Get Divorced

Divorce triggers a different set of concerns — and some important automatic protections under Idaho law, but not enough to rely on alone.

Idaho law does revoke any gift or fiduciary appointment made to a former spouse in a will once a divorce is finalized. So if your will left everything to your spouse and named them as personal representative, divorce automatically nullifies those provisions. The will is then read as if your ex-spouse had died before you. This means any person you named as a back-up to your spouse would move into the first position (even if that is a child or other relative of your now ex-spouse).

And this protection has other concerning limits and gaps. It applies to wills, but not necessarily to every document you've signed. Beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance policies are governed by federal law and contract, not Idaho's revocation statute. In most cases, a named ex-spouse on a beneficiary designation form will still receive that account — regardless of what your will says or what a divorce decree orders. This is one of the most common and costly estate planning mistakes made during and after divorce.

After a divorce is finalized, you should update:

• All beneficiary designations on retirement accounts, life insurance, and financial accounts

• Your will and any trusts, even if Idaho's automatic revocation provides some limited protection

• Powers of attorney, which Idaho law also revokes as to an ex-spouse — but should be replaced with a new document naming someone you trust

• Healthcare directives, to name a new healthcare agent

• Real Estate Deeds, because people assume that their divorce decree (which says one person gets the house) is all that is needed — but the divorce decree itself does nothing to remove the other spouse’s name from the home — that requires that a new deed document be signed by you and your ex, and then recorded with the County — we see this step in divorces missed constantly and it causes serious and expensive problems.

Don't Wait for the Dust to Settle

One of the most common mistakes people make is waiting until everything feels settled before revisiting their estate plan. It is a stressful time, and putting off estate planning updates for a year or two may feel appealing, but the period during and immediately after a major life change is exactly when the stakes are highest and the documents are most likely to produce a bad result if you die or become incapacitated.

If you've recently married, remarried, separated, or finalized a divorce, an estate planning review should be near the top of your to-do list — not something to get around to eventually. The consequences of outdated documents tend to surface at the worst possible time, when your family is least equipped to deal with them.

My law firm is currently offering free telephonic, electronic, or in-person consultations concerning probating estates or creating estate planning documents.

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Robert J. Green is an Elder Law, Trust, Estate, & Guardianship Attorney and the owner of Kootenai Law Group, PLLC in Coeur d’Alene. If you have questions about estate planning, probates, wills, trusts, powers of attorney, guardianships, Medicaid planning, or VA Benefit planning, contact Kootenai Law at 208-765-6555, [email protected], or visit www.KootenaiLaw.com.

This has been presented as general information and not as legal advice. Do not engage in legal decision-making without the advice of a competent attorney after discussion of your specific circumstances.