Update Your Will After Divorce in New Hampshire (RSA 551:5)
Divorce quietly rewrites parts of your estate plan and leaves other parts exactly as they were. New Hampshire law does cut your ex-spouse out of your will automatically — but a will that has been half-revoked by statute is a probate headache waiting to happen, and the parts the law does not touch are where your assets can still end up with the wrong person.
Does Divorce Revoke a Will in New Hampshire? Partly — Automatically
Yes, in part. Under RSA 551:5, once your final divorce decree is entered, your will operates as if your ex-spouse had predeceased you. That means:
- Any revocable gift to your former spouse in the will is revoked.
- Any nomination of your ex as executor, trustee, or guardian is revoked.
The same principle reaches your revocable trust, and New Hampshire also automatically revokes your ex-spouse's authority under your advance medical directive — ending their role as your health-care decision-maker.
So the law does real work for you. The problem is what it leaves behind.
Why "Automatically Revoked" Is Not Good Enough
A will that has been partially voided by statute still needs to be probated, and now it has holes. If your ex was your sole named beneficiary and executor, striking them out under RSA 551:5 can leave your will with no named beneficiary and no one nominated to administer it — which sends decisions to a default statutory order and, potentially, to a court-appointed administrator you never chose.
The document also becomes ambiguous. Contingent beneficiaries you named years ago, gift-over clauses, and guardianship nominations for minor children may no longer reflect what you want now that you are divorced. Relying on a statute to edit your will for you is a recipe for a contested, delayed, expensive probate.
The clean fix is not to patch the old will. Execute a fresh one.
What to Rebuild — The Full Estate Plan
Treat the divorce as the trigger to redo the whole set, not just the will:
- A new will. Name your beneficiaries and a new executor. If you have minor children, name a guardian and consider a testamentary trust rather than leaving assets to them outright.
- A new or amended revocable trust, if you have one, with updated trustees and beneficiaries.
- A new advance medical directive (health-care proxy and living will), naming someone other than your ex to make medical decisions.
- A new durable financial power of attorney. This one has a wrinkle: under RSA 564-E:110, your ex-spouse's authority as your financial agent is terminated automatically the moment a divorce, annulment, or separation petition is filed — earlier than the will's revocation, which waits for the final decree. Either way, name a new agent now.
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The Trap the Will Update Does Not Fix
Updating your will and trust does not touch your retirement and life-insurance beneficiaries. Those pass by beneficiary designation, outside your will entirely — and for employer plans governed by federal ERISA, state revocation law does not reach them at all. If your ex is still named on a 401(k) or pension form, the plan pays your ex when you die, regardless of what your new will says.
That is a separate task, and a critical one. Handle it alongside the will: see updating your beneficiaries after divorce in New Hampshire.
The Pending-Divorce Gap
If your divorce is still in progress, there is a dangerous window. During the months the case is litigated, your estranged spouse cannot act as your financial agent (RSA 564-E:110 terminated that at filing) — but the will's revocation of gifts to them does not happen until the final decree. So if you die before the decree is signed, your estranged spouse remains your default beneficiary and could inherit.
If your case is still pending, execute an interim will and update your trust now rather than waiting for the decree.
For readers outside New Hampshire: nearly every U.S. state has some form of automatic revocation-on-divorce for wills, but the statute number and its exact reach vary, and the ERISA carve-out for retirement plans is universal. RSA 551:5 and RSA 564-E:110 govern New Hampshire estates specifically.
Where the Estate Update Fits
The will is one piece of a coordinated post-divorce rebuild — tied to your beneficiary updates and everything else your decree set in motion.
The New Hampshire After-Divorce Checklist includes an estate-planning security audit that walks through the will, trust, medical directive, and power of attorney together — and pairs it with the beneficiary worksheet, so the documents your will controls and the assets it does not control both get handled, and nothing slips through the ERISA gap.
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