Updating Your Will After Divorce in Wisconsin

Wisconsin Statute § 854.15 automatically revokes any provisions in your will that benefit your ex-spouse the moment your divorce is finalized. On paper, that sounds like the law has your back. In practice, relying on automatic revocation instead of drafting a new will leaves serious gaps in your estate plan — especially if you have minor children.

What Automatic Revocation Actually Does

Section 854.15 treats your ex-spouse (and their relatives) as if they had predeceased you. Any bequest to your ex in your existing will is void. Any appointment of your ex as personal representative (executor) is void. Your former in-laws and stepchildren are also cut out.

But the statute does not rewrite your will. It just removes people from it. If your will left everything to your ex-spouse, the assets pass to the contingent beneficiaries named in the will — or, if there are none, through Wisconsin's intestate succession rules. That may or may not be what you want.

Why You Need a New Will

Contingent beneficiaries may be wrong. Many couples draft wills naming each other as primary beneficiary and their parents or siblings as contingent. After divorce, those contingent beneficiaries become your default heirs. If you have children, you probably want them to inherit — not your parents.

Guardianship for minor children. If you die while your children are minors, the surviving parent (your ex-spouse) typically gets custody. But your will is where you designate a guardian in case both parents are gone, and where you establish a trust to manage assets for your children. Without a trust, any inheritance passing to a minor goes into a court-supervised guardianship where the surviving parent may have significant influence over how those funds are managed.

Personal representative appointment. Your old will likely names your ex-spouse or someone connected to them as executor. The automatic revocation removes them, but it does not appoint a replacement. The court will appoint someone if no alternative is named — and you may not like their choice.

Powers of Attorney

Your divorce automatically revoked your ex-spouse's authority under any existing financial or medical Powers of Attorney. But third parties — banks, hospitals, emergency room staff — who are presented with the old document will act on it in good faith if they do not know about the divorce.

Execute entirely new Powers of Attorney:

• Financial Power of Attorney: Name someone you trust to manage your finances if you become incapacitated. Distribute the new document to your bank and investment accounts.
• Healthcare Power of Attorney: Name a new healthcare agent. Provide copies to your primary care physician, any specialists, and the hospital you would most likely be taken to in an emergency.

Destroy all copies of the old Powers of Attorney. As long as a physical copy exists, someone could present it to an institution that has no reason to question its validity.

Revocable Trusts

If you have a revocable living trust, review and amend it. Section 854.15 revokes provisions benefiting your ex-spouse, but the trust may also name your ex as successor trustee, grant them distributions for the benefit of your children, or reference marital property that has since been divided. A post-divorce trust amendment should reflect your current assets, your current beneficiaries, and your current wishes for how your children's inheritance is managed.

When to Do This

Draft your new estate documents within 60 to 90 days of the divorce. The gap between finalization and new documents is a vulnerability window — if something happens to you during that period, your estate plan is running on the defaults that automatic revocation left behind. Those defaults are rarely what anyone would choose intentionally.

The Wisconsin After-Divorce Checklist includes an estate planning section that walks through each document you need to update, with a timeline and checklist for wills, trusts, POAs, and beneficiary designations.

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