How Often Should You Update Your Will?

I’ll be honest with you: when I started Riverwise Estate Planning, I expected most of my work to be helping people write their first will. What I didn’t expect was how often I’d meet people whose will was years out of date — written for a life they no longer had.

A will from before you had children. A will that still names an ex-partner as executor. A will that leaves everything to a sibling you haven’t spoken to since a wedding that, frankly, didn’t end well. None of these are rare. They’re the normal result of life moving faster than paperwork.

Review your will every three to five years as a general habit. But the better rule isn’t a calendar reminder — it’s a life-event trigger. If any of the following have happened since you last looked at your will, it’s worth a review sooner rather than later:

According to recent research from the Money and Pensions Service, 56% of UK adults still don’t have a will at all — and that’s before we even get to the people whose will exists but no longer reflects their life. If your will is currently a note on your phone titled something like “do this eventually,” you are in extremely good company.

I understand the instinct. Updating a will isn’t most people’s idea of a fun Tuesday evening. But it doesn’t have to be the ordeal people expect. Most reviews are quick — often just confirming that what you already decided still makes sense, or making one or two changes rather than starting from scratch.

An out-of-date will is still a valid legal document — which is exactly the problem. It will still be followed, even if it no longer reflects what you’d actually want. Marriage automatically revokes an existing will in England and Wales, but divorce doesn’t remove an ex-partner as a beneficiary unless the will is updated. An executor who has since died can leave your estate without anyone clearly authorised to manage it, adding delay and cost at exactly the time your family needs neither.

None of this requires drama or a worst-case story to take seriously. It’s simply a document doing precisely what it was written to do — for a version of your life that has since moved on.

I tell clients the same thing I’d tell a friend: pick an anchor you’ll actually remember — a birthday, the start of the new year, the anniversary of when you first wrote it — and use that as your prompt to take five minutes and ask whether anything has changed. If nothing has, you’re done for another year. If something has, you’ll already know roughly what needs updating.

And if it’s been a while since you even know where your will is, that’s worth sorting too — a will no one can find is, in practical terms, almost as difficult as no will at all.

Our team’s Chief Happiness Officer doesn’t attend client meetings — he’s far too busy napping — but if he could weigh in, he’d tell you that the best time to sort something out is usually before it becomes urgent, not after. Same goes for your will.

If your will hasn’t been looked at in a while — or you’re not sure where it even is — I’m happy to talk it through with you. No pressure, no jargon, just a clear conversation about where things stand.

You might also find these useful: will writing in Swindon, mirror wills for couples, or find out about a lasting power of attorney in Swindon.