The most dangerous will is not the missing one — people at least know that gap exists. It is the outdated one: a valid, signed, professionally drafted document that no longer matches your family, your assets, or the law, distributing your estate to a life you stopped living years ago. Estates lawyers in both Canada and the US see the same casualties on repeat: the ex-spouse still named, the child born after signing, the executor who died first, the property sold long ago. The fix is a habit, not a project — knowing which events trigger a review, and doing the small update while it is small.
Marriage and divorce: the law edits your will without asking
Family-status changes are the most urgent triggers because in many places the law rewrites your documents automatically — and the automatic edits vary by jurisdiction in ways people get badly wrong. Divorce commonly revokes gifts to a former spouse and their appointment as executor in much of Canada and many US states — but separation without divorce often changes nothing, leaving a separated spouse fully entitled for the years the divorce takes. Marriage historically revoked entire wills in several jurisdictions; that rule has been abolished in some (Ontario dropped it in 2022) and persists in others, meaning a move or a wedding can silently invalidate or preserve documents depending on where you stand. The safe rule costs nothing: any marriage, separation, divorce, or new common-law relationship gets a will review within months, not years — and beneficiary designations on registered accounts and insurance, which the divorce rules often do not reach, get checked in the same sitting.
Children, and everyone the will names
A will written before children needs more than a new beneficiary line: guardianship nominations for minors (the clause parents care most about and template wills handle worst), trust provisions so a minor's inheritance is managed rather than paid out at eighteen, and decisions about ages and stages for distributions. Later, the same clause set needs revisiting as children become adults, marry, or develop circumstances that change planning — a child with a disability may be far better served by a properly structured trust (like Canada's Henson-style trusts, in provinces that recognize them) that preserves government benefits; a child in a shaky marriage or a creditor-exposed business may need protective structuring. The same review sweeps everyone else named: executors and alternates who have died, aged, moved abroad (foreign executors create tax and bonding complications), or simply become the wrong choice; guardians whose lives changed; charities that merged or dissolved. A will is a cast list, and cast lists age.
Money, moves, and the quiet triggers
- Buying or selling major assets — especially a business, real estate, or property abroad, each of which raises planning questions the old will never faced
- Moving provinces, states, or countries: formalities, marriage/divorce rules, probate costs, and tax treatment all shift with residence
- A meaningful change in estate size, in either direction — planning built for one scale misfits another (tax exposure appears, or complexity stops paying for itself)
- Beneficiary designations drifting out of sync with the will after job changes and account rollovers — the classic accidental disinheritance
- Deaths in the family that break the will's assumptions about who survives whom
The designations bullet deserves its own sentence, because it surprises the most people: registered accounts and life insurance generally pass by designation outside the will, so a will update that ignores them updates only part of the estate — and the old designation from two employers ago wins, regardless of what the new will says.
How updating actually works: codicil, new will, and the review habit
Mechanically, updates are easier than people expect. Small changes can technically ride on a codicil — a formally executed amendment — but in practice most lawyers now recommend a fresh will for almost any change: modern drafting makes re-execution cheap, a single current document avoids the interpretive mess of will-plus-amendments, and it eliminates the risk of a codicil surfacing without its will. What never works: handwriting changes onto the existing will, which in most jurisdictions either fails entirely or invalidates provisions unpredictably. Alongside the event triggers, adopt the calendar habit: a self-review every three to five years even when nothing obvious changed, because law reform, tax shifts, and slow drift accumulate — and the review is usually a fifteen-minute read that ends in "still fine." Store the signed original where your executor can actually find it, tell them where, and destroy superseded originals; duelling wills are an estate litigator's retirement plan.
The whole kit, not just the will
Every trigger event that touches the will touches its siblings: the powers of attorney for property and for health care (whose named attorneys age and drift exactly like executors), any trusts, and the informal but vital layer — the letter of wishes, the asset inventory, the passwords-and-accounts list that saves executors weeks. Reviewing the kit together costs little more than reviewing the will alone, and the failure modes of stale POAs are arguably worse, because they misfire while you are alive and incapacitated rather than after. The compact version of this whole article fits on a card: life event → review the kit; every few years → review it anyway; never hand-edit; keep designations in sync; tell your executor where things are. People who follow the card leave estates that settle in months with families intact. The alternative outcomes fill the cautionary literature — and the courts.
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