What Texas Decides If You Don't

Estate Planning

Here's a fact that reframes the whole "I keep meaning to do a will" conversation: you already have an estate plan. The Texas Legislature wrote it. It's called intestate succession, it applies to everyone who dies without a will, and it was drafted by people who have never met your family.

Most Texans assume that without a will, everything simply goes to the spouse. Sometimes true. Often not. And the exceptions land hardest on exactly the families who assumed they were fine.

The blended family surprise

Texas intestacy treats one situation very differently than people expect: a married person with children from a PRIOR relationship.

For community property (most of what a couple builds during the marriage), if all your children are also your surviving spouse's children, the spouse keeps everything. Simple.

But if you have even one child from a previous marriage or relationship, your half of the community property goes to YOUR CHILDREN, not your spouse. Your wife keeps her half; your kids, including that child from your first marriage, inherit yours.

Play that forward in a hypothetical (invented for illustration, not real clients): second marriage, fifteen good years, house and accounts built together, his adult son from marriage one lives out of state. He dies without a will. His widow now co-owns her own home with her stepson. If the relationship is warm, it's paperwork. If it isn't, she needs his signature to sell the house she lives in. The Legislature's plan did that, not anyone's wishes.

Separate property (owned before the marriage, or inherited) has its own split: with children, the spouse gets one-third of personal property and only a life estate in one-third of real estate, with the rest to the children. More co-ownership, more complexity, less of what anyone would have chosen.

What the state's plan also skips

Beyond who-gets-what, dying intestate in Texas means: no executor you chose (the court appoints an administrator, with more supervision and cost), no guardian you named for minor children (a judge decides), potentially a "determination of heirship" proceeding where the court formally establishes your family tree with witnesses, and zero say in timing: an 18-year-old heir inherits outright, in cash, on their 18th birthday. Every one of those defaults is replaceable with a document you control.

To be fair to Texas: our probate is genuinely better than most states'. With a valid will requesting "independent administration," a Texas executor operates with minimal court supervision, and the process is often faster and cheaper than the horror stories from California suggest. The Texas problem isn't that probate with a will is terrible. It's that dying WITHOUT one forfeits all of that efficiency and every one of your preferences at the same time.

The Texas toolkit (cheaper than you think)

Alongside beneficiary designations, TOD and POD forms, and the other fundamentals, two Texas-specific tools belong in the kit:

The Transfer on Death Deed. Texas lets you record a simple deed that passes your HOUSE directly to a named person at death, skipping probate entirely, while you keep full ownership and control while alive (you can sell, mortgage, or revoke it anytime). It costs a filing fee and a notarized form. For many Texas households the house is the largest probate asset, and this one document removes it from the process.

The will itself, with independent administration language. For straightforward situations, a Texas attorney will typically draft a will package (will, powers of attorney, medical directives) for roughly $500 to $1,500. Blended families, business owners, and larger estates warrant more. Either way, it's one of the cheapest documents-per-consequence in existence: it overrides the entire intestacy scheme, names the executor, the guardian, and the timing, and preserves the streamlined probate Texas actually does well.

One caution from the Texas Freeze letter still applies: a "trust package" isn't automatically better than a will in Texas, and moving the homestead into a trust without the right language can jeopardize the over-65 property tax freeze. Match the tool to the estate, not to the seminar that sold it.

The one-hour version

Confirm your beneficiary and TOD designations are current, because those bypass intestacy no matter what. Then, if any of these describe you (blended family, minor children, a business, real estate beyond the homestead, or simply no will at all), book the attorney hour. Bring the account list and the two or three names that matter: executor, guardian, backup.

You'll leave an estate plan either way. The only question is whose.