Your Spouse Does Not Automatically Inherit Everything

Ask married couples what happens to their things if they die without a will. Most will say it all goes to the husband or the wife. In Georgia that is not what the law says.

Trust & Will's 2026 survey of 5,000 American adults put will ownership at 26%, down from 31% a year earlier. So about three in four have not written one. Every one of them has a formula waiting, written by their state legislature, and almost none of them have read it.

What Georgia's formula actually says

The statute is O.C.G.A. § 53-2-1. Die without a will leaving a spouse and no children, and your spouse is the sole heir. That is the version everyone already has in their head.

Add children and it changes. The spouse shares equally with the children, and the spouse's portion can never drop below one third.

Take a household with three kids. Divided four ways the spouse would get a quarter. The statute lifts that to a third, and the children split the remaining two thirds. Your surviving spouse now owns a third of the house they live in. Your children own the rest of it.

That last part assumes the house was in your name alone. A home held jointly with your spouse usually passes straight to them. That is one of the few places where the default already works the way people assume.

Young children do not inherit into a bank account

If a child inheriting is under eighteen, the money does not go to your spouse to look after on their behalf. Above a fairly modest amount, Georgia requires a conservator, appointed by the probate court and filing accountings to that court until the child turns eighteen.

On that birthday the conservatorship ends and the balance is handed over. Outright. To an eighteen-year-old.

That is never anyone's plan. It is just what the default does when there is nothing else written down.

The court also picks who raises them

A will is where you nominate a guardian for young children. Without one, the probate court decides, working from whoever steps forward. Judges take that seriously and mostly get it right. They are still guessing at a decision you could have made yourself in a single sentence.

Every state runs a different formula

None of this is a Georgia peculiarity. Every state has its own intestacy statute and the shares are not the same. Some give the surviving spouse everything when all the children are also that spouse's children. Some treat stepchildren differently again.

What they have in common is this: not choosing is not an option. You choose between your plan and theirs.

The form that overrides your will anyway

This one catches people who did write a will. Your 401(k), your IRA and your life insurance do not pass under a will at all. They pass to whoever is named on the beneficiary form, and that name wins no matter what the will says.

Most of the errors I find are here rather than in the will. A form filled out at a job someone left in 2011, naming a parent, or left blank, quietly governing the largest account they own.

Half an hour, not a project

Pull up your retirement accounts and your life insurance and read who is named. That takes about twenty minutes. Then write down two names: who raises your children, and who settles your affairs. Those two answers are most of a will already.

If someone in your circle has young children and has been meaning to do this for years, forward this to them. The eighteenth-birthday part is the piece that surprises people most.

If you would like someone to sit with you while you go through it, I am happy to help.