What Estate Documents Do You Actually Need?
Seven documents make up a basic estate plan: a will, a guardianship nomination, a living trust, another trust if your situation calls for one, a durable power of attorney, an advance healthcare directive, and final disposition instructions. Most households have none of them. Among 58,406 households who completed a Savology financial report card, 53.3% held not a single one of the seven, despite owning a home, being married, or having children (source: Savology platform data, August 2026).
That’s the largest single gap on the report card, and it’s also the least expensive one to close.
What each document actually does
A will says who receives what, and names the person responsible for carrying that out. Without one, your state decides both, using a formula that has never met your family.
A guardianship nomination names who raises your children if you and your co-parent can’t. This is the document parents most often assume is covered by something else. It isn’t.
A durable power of attorney lets someone you trust handle money matters — paying bills, managing accounts — if you’re alive but unable to. Without it, that access usually requires a court process, at exactly the moment your household can least absorb one.
An advance healthcare directive does the same job for medical decisions, and records what you’d want done. It spares the people who love you from guessing.
A living trust can hold assets so they pass without going through probate, which is the court process for settling an estate. It’s more involved to set up than a will, and it isn’t necessary for everyone.
Other trusts cover specific situations — a child with a disability, a blended family, a business.
Final disposition instructions record what you want done with your remains. It is a small document that takes a hard decision away from a grieving family.
The need starts earlier than most people expect
The pattern in the data is not the one you’d guess. Estate preparation doesn’t improve steadily as people get older and accumulate more. It gets worse first.
| Age | Share with none of the seven documents |
|---|---|
| Under 30 | 41.3% |
| 30–39 | 64.5% |
| 40–49 | 59.3% |
| 50–59 | 46.3% |
| 60+ | 33.3% |
Preparation is at its worst between 30 and 39 — nearly two in three households. That is precisely the decade when people are most likely to have young children and a first mortgage, which is to say the decade when these documents do the most work.
The likely reason is that estate planning feels like something you do once you have an estate. But the documents that matter most in your thirties aren’t about wealth at all. A guardianship nomination has nothing to do with how much money you have. Neither does a healthcare directive.
The line also never fully recovers: among households 60 and over, one in three still has none of the seven.
If you have children, this is the number that matters
28,500 households in that data have children. Among them, 88.1% have not named a guardian, and 73.3% have no will.
A guardianship nomination is the document that says who raises your children if you and your co-parent can’t. It costs almost nothing, it doesn’t depend on what you own, and for most parents it’s the single most consequential piece of paper they’ll ever sign. Across all households in the data, 7% have one.
If you read nothing else here, that’s the one to act on.
Why this gap persists
Three things keep this gap open, and none of them is cost.
Nothing prompts you. Your lender tells you when a mortgage payment is due. Your card issuer tells you your balance. No institution sends a monthly notice asking whether your will reflects your current family. The absence of a prompt is most of the problem.
It requires deciding, not just doing. A will asks who raises your children and who handles your affairs. Those are hard conversations, and a conversation with no deadline is very easy to postpone.
People assume something else covers it. Beneficiary designations on a retirement account or life insurance policy do direct those specific assets, which leads a lot of households to believe the whole job is done. It isn’t. Those designations say nothing about guardianship, medical decisions, or any asset without a named beneficiary.
A sensible order to work through them
You don’t need all seven, and you don’t need them at once. If you’re starting from zero:
- If you have children under 18, start with the guardianship nomination. Nothing else on this list carries the same consequence.
- Then the healthcare directive and durable power of attorney. These two matter while you’re alive, which is the part people overlook. They’re also usually the simplest to complete.
- Then a will. It handles everything the beneficiary designations don’t.
- Consider a trust only if your situation calls for it — probate avoidance, a blended family, a child with a disability, property in more than one state. Plenty of households never need one.
- Final disposition instructions whenever you’re ready. Small effort, real kindness.
What “done” looks like
Getting one document in place moves you from having nothing to having something, and on our report card that single step is the difference between a failing grade and a passing one. It is one of the few places in a financial life where the first small action produces most of the benefit.
Two habits keep it done. Tell someone where the documents are — a perfect will nobody can find does no work. And revisit them when your life changes: a marriage, a divorce, a birth, a death, a move to another state, or a substantial change in what you own. Otherwise, a check every few years is plenty.
None of this requires investable assets, and none of it requires you to have figured out the rest of your financial life first. It mostly requires deciding.