If you’ve ever sat through a conversation with married friends about their estate plan and thought “that doesn’t really apply to me,” you were right. Most of what gets written about estate planning assumes a spouse, kids, and a house you bought together thirty years ago. If that’s not your life, a plan built for that life is going to leave gaps in yours.
We see this a lot in our Phoenix practice. Our clients who are single women in their 60s tend to have built something impressive on their own. They travel when they want to. They’ve made their own money and their own decisions for decades. They might have a partner they adore who they never felt the need to marry. And they know exactly who and what they care about, whether that’s nieces and nephews, close friends, a favorite charity, or all of the above.
None of that fits neatly into the “leave everything to my spouse, then split it among the kids” template. So here’s what actually needs to look different.
Arizona’s default plan was not written with you in mind
If you don’t have a will or trust in Arizona, the state has already written a plan for you. It’s called intestate succession, and it follows a strict order under Arizona law (A.R.S. § 14-2103).
Here’s the part that surprises people: if you’re single with no children, your estate does not stop with the people closest to you. It goes to your parents. If they’re gone, it goes to your siblings. If you don’t have siblings, it moves on to nieces, nephews, and even grandparents. There’s no stop along the way for a longtime partner, a close friend who’s like family, or the organization you’ve supported for twenty years.
We say this gently, but directly: the people you’d actually want to receive something from you may get nothing, while a distant relative you haven’t spoken to in years could inherit everything. That’s not a scare tactic. It’s just what the statute says, and it’s exactly why a plan matters more for you than it does for someone whose spouse and kids are automatically covered by law.
Community property doesn’t cover you the way it covers married couples
Arizona is a community property state, and married couples benefit from tools like community property with right of survivorship, which lets assets pass directly to a surviving spouse without probate (A.R.S. § 25-211).
If you’re not married, none of that applies to you, even if you’ve been with your partner for fifteen years. Arizona law simply doesn’t create automatic ownership or inheritance rights between unmarried partners. Whatever protection married couples get built in, you have to build on purpose, through a properly funded trust, beneficiary designations, and clear documents that say what you actually want.
This is one of the biggest differences between your plan and your married friends’ plans. Theirs has a legal safety net underneath it. Yours needs to be the safety net, from the ground up.
You get to decide who “family” means, and your plan should say so
One of our favorite parts of this work is helping clients think through who they actually want to include. For a lot of our single clients, that list looks different than a traditional family tree. It might include a partner, a best friend, a niece who’s always checked in on you, a sibling’s kids, and a cause you’ve cared about for years, like SARRC or another organization close to your heart.
A revocable living trust lets you name exactly those people and causes, in exactly the shares you choose, and keeps the whole thing out of probate court. No waiting on a judge. No public court file. No distant relative showing up with a legal claim you never intended them to have. Just your plan, carried out the way you designed it.
Who speaks for you if you can’t speak for yourself
This is the part people think about even less than inheritance, and for our clients, it might matter more.
If you’re ever in an accident or a sudden health crisis and can’t communicate your wishes, Arizona law has a backup plan for who gets to make your medical decisions, and it’s called the surrogate priority list (A.R.S. § 36-3231). It goes in this order: spouse, then adult child, then parent, then domestic partner, if you’re unmarried and no one else has already taken on financial responsibility for you, then a sibling, then a close friend.
Read that list again. If you’re single with no kids and your parents have passed, the law jumps past your partner of many years and hands decision-making authority to a sibling you may not be close with, or someone else entirely. Even when a partner does qualify, hospitals can be slow to recognize a domestic partner without documentation, and HIPAA rules can block them from even getting information about your condition in the meantime. If family members disagree about your care, the dispute can end up in front of a judge while you’re the one in the hospital bed.
A health care power of attorney fixes this cleanly. It lets you name the actual person you want making decisions, whether that’s your partner, a sibling, or a close friend, without waiting on a statutory list to sort it out. Pair it with a living will that spells out your wishes on life-sustaining treatment, and your agent isn’t left guessing what you would have wanted. We also help clients think through related questions that often get missed, like organ donation, disposition of remains, and who should be involved if a dementia diagnosis changes what kind of care and support you need over time.
Your plan should also travel as easily as you do
If you’re the type to book a trip on a whim, your documents need to keep up with your life. A financial power of attorney and a health care power of attorney let someone you trust step in if you’re ever unreachable or unable to make decisions yourself, whether you’re in Phoenix or somewhere with terrible cell service. Married clients often default to naming a spouse for these roles. You get to choose the person who actually makes sense for your life, whether that’s a partner, a sibling, or a close friend.
The bottom line
You built your life on your own terms, and your estate plan should reflect that. Not a copy of what works for your married friends, but a plan designed around the people and causes that actually matter to you, and the person you actually trust to speak for you if you ever need someone to.
If you’ve been putting this off because you assumed your situation was too complicated, or too simple, or just different, we’d love to talk it through with you. This is exactly the kind of planning we enjoy doing most.
