Every October, Estate Planning Awareness Week brings the same advice: get an estate plan. It's good advice, but it assumes that people without documents have no plan, and that's rarely true. If you live in Maryland and haven't signed your own, the state has already decided who inherits your property, who manages it for your children, and who handles your affairs if you can't. Those rules are written into the Estates and Trusts Article of the Maryland Code. They apply automatically, and almost nobody has read them.
The rules were written for the average family, so they fit yours only where your family happens to be average. Here is what they say.
Who inherits. A married Maryland resident who dies without a will doesn't always leave everything to the surviving spouse. If any child is a minor, the spouse generally receives one-half of the probate estate and the children divide the other half. If there's no minor child, the spouse generally takes everything, unless you have children from another relationship. In that case the spouse receives the first $100,000 plus one-half of the rest, and those children share the remainder. Most married parents I meet assume everything goes to their spouse. With a minor child in the house, half goes to the children instead.
How children inherit. A minor can't own property outright, so a child's share is generally managed under court supervision until age 18. At 18 the money belongs to the child, with no conditions. If you bought life insurance to provide for your children, picture the full proceeds arriving on an 18th birthday.
Who raises your children. If both parents die and neither has nominated a guardian, a judge decides who raises the children. Judges work hard to get that decision right, but they choose among whoever comes forward, and they have never heard the conversations you and your spouse have had about it.
Who acts if you can't. This is the part people forget entirely. If you become incapacitated without a durable financial power of attorney and an advance directive, your spouse or adult child may have to ask the circuit court to appoint a guardian before anyone can pay your bills, manage your accounts or make medical decisions. The process is public, takes weeks or months, and costs money, all while your family is dealing with the emergency itself.
What a will changes. A will replaces most of these rules with your own choices, and for some families a will is the right tool. Two limits are worth knowing. First, a will in Maryland goes through probate: it is filed with the Register of Wills, becomes public, and the estate stays open at least through the six-month period for creditor claims, often longer. Second, a will governs only the probate estate. Retirement accounts, life insurance and accounts with a payable-on-death or transfer-on-death designation pass under their own beneficiary forms, whatever the will says.
Put together, most families have a patchwork: the state's default rules, beneficiary forms signed during onboarding at three different jobs, perhaps a will written before the second child was born. Each piece made sense when it was signed. Very few families have checked whether the pieces still agree with one another.
So here is the question worth asking this week. Suppose something happened to you tonight. Would your spouse have the money and the legal authority to keep the household running? Would your children be raised by the people you'd choose, with their inheritance managed until they're ready for it? Could your family handle all of it without going to court?
If you can answer yes to each of those, you're in better shape than most. If you can't, or you aren't sure, let's talk. In a 15-minute First Conversation, you'll find out whether a will, a trust-based plan or a few updated forms would do what you want. Schedule your First Conversation →
This article is general information about Maryland law, not legal advice for your situation.
