Dying without a will in New Jersey

New Jersey's intestacy laws are not cruel. They are not arbitrary. They are, however, written for a hypothetical average family that doesn't exist in most households — and the results are often genuinely surprising to the people they affect.

Here is the basic structure. If you die without a will in New Jersey and you are married with children, your spouse and your children share your estate. If all the children are also your spouse's children, the spouse inherits everything. If any children are from a prior relationship — a previous marriage, an earlier partner — the estate splits between your current spouse and those children in proportions set by statute, not by your wishes. A 50-year-old man with two adult children from a first marriage and a current wife of eight years may have intended his wife to inherit the house outright. The law may split it differently.

The rules get more complicated from there. If you are unmarried but have a long-term partner — a situation common among older New Jerseyans who have been together for years but never formalized the relationship — your partner inherits nothing under intestacy. Not the house. Not the accounts. Not the car. Everything passes to your next of kin by blood, in an order that moves from children to parents to siblings to more distant relatives. Your partner has no legal claim unless their name is on the deed or the account.

Minor children present a separate problem. If both parents die simultaneously — in a car accident, for example — and no will names a guardian, the decision goes to a Surrogate's Court. The court applies a best-interest standard and will generally appoint a suitable family member, but 'suitable' and 'who you would have chosen' are not the same thing. A will that names a guardian takes about ten minutes to add and removes that question from a judge entirely.

The accounts that skip probate entirely are worth mentioning here because people frequently confuse having a will with having a plan. IRAs, 401(k)s, and life insurance policies pass to whoever is named as beneficiary, regardless of the will. A 58-year-old widow who has updated her IRA beneficiary designation after her husband's death is better positioned than a 58-year-old widow with a carefully drafted will but stale beneficiary forms still listing the deceased husband. Both documents matter. They do different jobs.

New Jersey also still has an estate tax for estates over $675,000 — a threshold that has not moved in decades and now captures households that wouldn't have considered themselves wealthy when the number was set. A Bergen County couple with a paid-off house, modest retirement accounts, and a life insurance policy can find themselves above the threshold without having planned for it. The federal exemption is dramatically higher, which is why most national estate planning content ignores this. New Jersey residents should not.

None of this requires a complicated estate plan. A simple will, a healthcare directive, a durable power of attorney, and a beneficiary audit across every account covers most households completely. The work takes a few hours. The absence of it takes decades — sometimes — to sort out. A fiduciary adviser who coordinates with your estate attorney is the clearest path to making sure both sides of that equation are handled.

We don't draft wills — that's your estate attorney's job, and it should be. What we do is make sure the beneficiary designations match the intent of the estate plan, that the accounts are titled correctly, and that a sudden death doesn't turn into a year of court proceedings and family disagreement that the person who died would have found mortifying.

One practical note on timing: the best moment to do this work is not when someone is ill or when a death has just occurred — both of those moments carry enough difficulty without adding document review. The best moment is the first time a household has a financial advisor who asks the question at all. We ask it at the first meeting, and we put the estate review on the agenda for the following one. The work takes a few hours. The absence of it can take years to untangle.

One planning note specific to Northern New Jersey: property in Bergen, Essex, and Hudson Counties has appreciated significantly over the past two decades. A couple who bought a home in the 1990s, combined it with modest retirement savings and a life insurance policy, can find their combined estate well above New Jersey's $675,000 estate tax threshold — without ever having thought of themselves as wealthy enough to need estate planning. The state tax exemption has not been indexed to inflation or real estate values. It captures households that would have been below it when the threshold was set. Knowing where the threshold sits, and whether the household is above it, is worth a conversation before the moment it becomes an emergency. The conversation takes an hour. The absence of it can take considerably longer to repair. We flag this in every planning engagement with clients in this region, not as a scare tactic, but because the math has quietly changed for a lot of households that have not caught up to it. A simple net worth estimate, stacked against the state threshold, answers the question in most cases — and changes the planning conversation when the answer comes back over the line.