How to Make a Will
A will is the legal document that says who gets your property when you die and who is in charge of making that happen. Without one, Texas's intestacy statute makes both of those decisions for you, and the result does not always match what you would have chosen yourself. Under Estates Code Chapter 201, a surviving spouse's share of community property and their share of separate property are calculated under different rules, and either one can be smaller than most people assume — especially in a second marriage or a blended family. A will replaces those default rules with your own instructions.
Making a will is not complicated in the paperwork sense; the document itself is often a handful of pages. What takes the time is deciding what it should say: who administers your estate, who inherits what, who raises your children if both parents are gone, and where your accounts and passwords are when your executor needs them. Putting those decisions off does not avoid them — it just hands them to a probate court instead of to you.
Choosing Your Executor
Your executor — an independent executor, in most well-drafted Texas wills — is the person who probates your will, inventories your estate, pays its debts, and distributes what is left to your beneficiaries. Texas is one of the more executor-friendly states for this role because of independent administration: under Estates Code Title 2, Subtitle I, a will can authorize the executor to handle the entire process without going back to court for approval at every step, as long as the will says so or all the beneficiaries later agree. Most states default to ongoing court supervision; Texas lets your will opt out of it.
Because that authority is broad, choose someone you trust with your entire estate, not just someone who happens to be available. Family, friends, and attorneys can all serve as executor; a bank or trust company can too, for a fee, if you would rather not put the job on a relative. Name a backup executor in the same clause — if your first choice cannot or will not serve, the will should say who steps in, rather than leaving the court to appoint someone from scratch. And tell your executor where the will actually is. An executor with full legal authority still cannot act on a document they cannot find.
Deciding Who Inherits Your Assets
A will can leave specific items to specific people — the truck to one child, a parent's ring to another — and it should also include a residuary clause covering everything you did not list by name. Without one, any asset your will forgets, or anything you acquire after signing it, is not necessarily distributed the way the rest of your estate is; some of it can end up passing under the intestacy rules you were trying to avoid in the first place, right alongside the assets your will does cover. The residuary clause is what catches everything else.
Community property complicates this further. Under Section 201.003, Texas treats community property and separate property as distinct categories with different default rules, and a married person generally can only give away their own share of the community estate, not their spouse's share. Get specific advice on this if you are married and naming anyone other than your spouse as a beneficiary of a shared asset.
Also plan for the possibility that a named beneficiary dies before you do. A will that names a beneficiary but never says what happens if that person is gone leaves the court to guess — usually by folding that share into the residuary clause, which may not be what you intended. Naming an alternate for each significant gift closes that gap.
One coordination problem is not fixed by the will at all: life insurance, retirement accounts, and payable-on-death bank accounts pass to whoever is named on that account's own beneficiary form, regardless of what the will says. If you update your will but never update the form, the form wins. Go back through those designations every time you revise your estate plan.
Not everything you own has to pass through your will in the first place. Real estate or a business held in an LLC, or assets moved into a properly funded trust, can transfer according to the entity's or trust's own terms instead of going through probate — which is why some owners use a Texas Real Estate Holding Company or a Texas Family Holding Company to consolidate several assets under one structure rather than listing each one individually in a will. Probate is also a public court record; a private and anonymous LLC keeps the ownership details of the underlying asset out of that record even when the rest of the estate still goes through probate.
Naming a Guardian for Minor Children (and Pets)
If you have children under 18, your will is where you name a guardian to raise them if both parents are gone. Texas guardianship cases are decided by a probate court under Estates Code Section 1104.053, and the court is not automatically bound by your choice — but a documented preference, signed as part of a valid will, is the strongest evidence of your wishes the court will see, and it heads off exactly the kind of dispute between relatives that ends up litigated when no one knows what you wanted.
Name a backup guardian here too, for the same reason you named a backup executor. And separate the question of who raises your children from the question of who manages any money or property left to them — those can be the same person or two different people, and for larger inheritances many parents deliberately choose two, so one person is not solely responsible for both a child's upbringing and their finances.
Pets do not need a guardian in the legal sense — Texas treats a pet as personal property, not a beneficiary — but you can still name a caretaker and leave money earmarked for the animal's care as a specific bequest, the same way you would leave any other item to a chosen person.
Your Digital Assets
Your estate does not stop at your bank accounts and your house. Photos, email, cloud storage, social media, and any cryptocurrency or online-only accounts are part of it too, and they come with a problem physical property does not have: a platform's own terms of service, not just state law, can stand between your executor and the account. Texas has adopted its own version of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which is what actually gives a named executor legal standing to request access to, or closure of, your digital accounts. Without that authority stated somewhere — in your will, or in a separate online tool a growing number of platforms now offer — a company can lean on its own terms of service to refuse your executor even after the will has been probated.
Keep a list of what exists. Not the passwords themselves inside the will, since a probated will becomes a public record, but a pointer your executor can actually follow — a password manager, or a sealed document stored separately with instructions for where to find it.
Common Mistakes That Undermine a Will
Most of the wills that cause problems in probate are not invalid on their face — they are technically valid but incomplete, outdated, or drafted in a way that conflicts with something else in the estate plan. The patterns show up often enough to name directly:
- Not updating the will after marriage, divorce, a new child, or a move. A will is a snapshot of your wishes on the day you signed it, and a major life event can make that snapshot wrong.
- Attaching conditions to a gift instead of leaving a clean, unconditional bequest. Conditional language is one of the more common sources of a will contest, because it invites an argument over whether the condition was actually met.
- Putting funeral or end-of-life instructions inside the will itself. A will is frequently not located and read until after the funeral has already happened, which is too late for those instructions to matter — that guidance belongs in a separate document your family can access immediately, not buried in a will.
- Leaving a beneficiary designation on a retirement account or life insurance policy that no longer reflects your wishes. As covered above, that form controls regardless of what the will says.
- Signing a will without meeting Texas's execution requirements. A formally witnessed will needs the testator's signature, attested by two credible witnesses at least 14 years old, under Section 251.051. Skip a witness, or use one who cannot be located years later, and the will can be far harder to probate than it needed to be — which is exactly what a self-proving affidavit under Sections 251.101 through 251.104 is designed to prevent.
Should You Make Your Will Online?
Online will services and template software exist because a simple estate — one or two beneficiaries, no minor children, no business interests, no blended family — does not always need an attorney's full attention. If that describes your situation, a template can produce a will that satisfies Texas's basic execution requirements, and a signed, witnessed will of any kind is better than no will at all.
The risk shows up as soon as the situation is not simple. A template cannot tell you that Texas offers a self-proving affidavit, or flag that a beneficiary designation on your 401(k) contradicts what you just typed into the will, or notice that a condition you attached to a gift is exactly the kind of language that invites a contest. Those are the details a DIY tool is least equipped to catch, because catching them requires knowing your specific situation well enough to know what to ask about — which is the part an attorney provides and a form does not.
Reviewing and Storing Your Will
Store the signed original somewhere secure and tell your executor exactly where. A will your executor cannot find is no better than no will at all. Then revisit it after any major life change — marriage, divorce, a new child or grandchild, a move, a change in what you own, or a falling-out or reconciliation with someone named in it. None of that requires starting over; it requires an update, which is a much smaller task than the one you have already finished by putting a will in place to begin with. For the rest of what a complete Texas estate plan should cover beyond the will itself, see our Estate Planning Checklist.