Estate Planning Has Its Own Week. Most of Us Still Won't Use It.

Relative Ease News · October 12, 2026

October 19 through 25 is National Estate Planning Awareness Week. It has been on the calendar for eighteen years, it exists because Congress put it there, and if the polling is any indication, most American families will let it pass without doing the one thing it asks of them: writing down what happens if they don't come home.

Here's the strange part. This isn't a Hallmark holiday. In 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives passed House Resolution 1499, which proclaimed the third full week of October as National Estate Planning Awareness Week. The effort was led by the National Association of Estate Planners & Councils (NAEPC) working with Rep. Mike Thompson of California and 49 of his colleagues from both parties. The resolution's language was blunt for a congressional document: a lack of planning could leave a family's assets "disposed of to unintended parties by default through the complex process of probate." At the time, an estimated 120 million Americans were believed to have no up-to-date estate plan at all.

The gap hasn't closed. It's widened.

You'd think eighteen years of awareness weeks would move the needle. They haven't. Caring.com has surveyed American adults about wills every year since 2015, most recently with YouGov in 2025, polling more than 2,500 adults. The results went the wrong direction: just 24% of respondents said they have a will, down from 33% in 2022. Another 13% reported having a living trust. Add it up and more than half of American adults have no will whatsoever.

The reasons aren't mysterious. Asked why they hadn't made a will or trust, 43% of respondents without one gave the most honest answer in survey research: they "just haven't gotten around to it." Procrastination has topped the list every year since 2022. Nearly a quarter said nothing could ever motivate them to start. And the single biggest motivator people named wasn't a birthday, a baby, or a news event. It was a medical diagnosis — 37% said a health scare is what would finally push them to plan. In other words, the most common plan for making a plan is to wait until something goes wrong.

What "estate planning" actually means

Part of the problem is the name. "Estate" sounds like a gated property and a lawyer in a wood-paneled office. For most families, an estate plan is four unglamorous things: a will that says who raises your kids and who gets the house; a power of attorney so someone you trust can pay your bills if you're incapacitated; a healthcare directive that spells out your wishes; and beneficiary forms on retirement accounts and life insurance that actually match what your will says. None of that requires wealth. It requires an afternoon.

What it prevents is the default. Die without a will and your state's intestacy statute decides for you — a formula written by legislators who never met your family. The Awareness Week resolution Congress passed in 2008 warned about exactly that, and the warning hasn't expired.

Four things you can finish this week

1. Write down the basics. You don't need a finished legal document by Friday. A single page listing your accounts, your insurance policies, your debts, and who should get what is the raw material every will is built from — and it's the page your family will need most if anything happens before the paperwork is done.

2. Check your beneficiaries. Pull up your retirement accounts, life insurance, and bank accounts and look at the beneficiary designations. These override your will, and they're routinely a decade out of date — former spouses, deceased parents, kids who are now adults. This takes twenty minutes and is the highest-value chore on the list.

3. Name your people. Decide who would raise your children, who would make medical decisions for you, and who would handle money. Then tell them. A guardian who learns of the job from a court filing has been handed the hardest version of an already hard job.

4. Make the plan findable. A will in a drawer nobody knows about is a rumor. Store your documents, your account inventory, and the practical details of your life — passwords' locations, the email account everything resets through, the name of your insurance agent — somewhere a trusted person can actually reach.

That fourth step is why we built Relative Ease. The free digital locker stores the practical details of a household — accounts, documents, contacts, instructions — in one encrypted place your family can be given access to, and the state directory connects you with licensed estate planning attorneys in all 50 states when you're ready for the legal work itself. Awareness Week runs through October 25. An afternoon is all it asks.

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