Why Minor Children Cannot Be Left Out of a Will

If you're mad at your 16-year-old, you are not allowed to leave them out of your will. You are not allowed to disinherit your minors. And then that can kind of be a tricky thing where, you know, if you have a troubled teen or something like that, I have seen people try to do it. It's not enforceable, because it directly clashes with the statutes in Arizona.

And that's why it's really important to go to a licensed attorney estate planner to do your documents, because this is something I've seen document preparers do, where they won't ask how old the child is. They'll just disinherit them. Whereas an attorney would ask the age and would dig in deeper and say, "Hey, you know, legally you can't do that. I'm not putting that in here."

But there are specific requirements of who can contest a will, but again, that's something that gets covered during the consultation with my attorneys. Again, there's a variety of factors that go into it, where doesn't make sense to even bring this forward, or is this just more of us kind of giving them the conversation of, it sucks, I'm sorry, but the chance of success here is so low, and the financial and emotional turmoil you would put yourself through is not worth it, in our opinion.

Now, they can take that information and do what they want with it, but I would say that's more common than, "Hey, let's get you engaged and let's start this process."