The top 10 things: you need to know about the Wills and Succession Act.

• Author: Kelly, Sherrilynn J.
• Position: Feature: Wills and Estates

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1. Everything you know or thought you knew about wills and the like is probably no longer correct.

   The law with respect to the disposition of your property on your death was inherited from England hundreds of years ago; and it has been many decades since this area of the law has been reformed. On February 1, 2012, Alberta ushered in the Wills and Succession Act that, in short, consolidates five pieces of relevant legislation into one, four of which were substantially changed.

   Estate planning, while often ignored, is also frequently misunderstood. The disposition of your property on your death is your last act--one you can plan for or let chance determine. As such, there is no better time than now to familiarize you with this new legislation.

2. Marriage will NO longer revoke a will.

   Marriage will no longer revoke a will after February 1, 2012 and this provision applies regardless of when the will was made.

   It was long thought that when a person marries any existing will should be revoked as a consequence, since the newly married person would now want his estate to go to his new spouse and the family they would have together. But with the advent of divorce; single parenthood; people living together instead of getting married; second marriages; "starter" marriages; adult interdependent partnerships and all the other changes in society in the last fifty years at least, this long-known truism is no longer true.

   So long as the effect of marriage was to revoke a will, and the person marrying did not make a new will, her estate fell to be distributed on intestacy or by a statutory scheme of distribution that favoured those who were thought to be the nearest and dearest to the deceased. To the extent those who were near and dear to the deceased were the surviving spouse and their children, the scheme worked but not the way most people thought. The surviving spouse did not inherit the entirety of the deceased's estate but shared it with the deceased's, not necessarily their, children.

   A surviving spouse under the new Act will not be left bereft if his deceased spouse did not get around to updating her will; dependant relief legislation allows the surviving spouse to make a claim on the deceased spouse's estate. Public policy, even though it creates one of the few restrictions on testamentary freedom that exists, is that a person is obliged to look out for their dependants after they die--spouses have always been one category of...