You Moved States. Your Estate Plan Didn't Get the Memo.

Relative Ease News · October 23, 2026

National Estate Planning Awareness Week runs October 19 through 25, and most reminders are generic: make a will, check your beneficiaries. One Denver firm used the week to point at a narrower problem. In an October 15 announcement, Thomas N. Scheffel & Associates urged families to review their plans, with particular attention to couples who moved to Colorado from a community property state — because a Colorado law effective August 12, 2026 changed what happens to their homes when the first spouse dies. The law is House Bill 26-1189, signed April 13, 2026. It amends Colorado's Uniform Community Property Disposition at Death Act. The change sounds technical. Its effect is not.

Two different systems for owning things as a married couple

Most states use the common-law system: property belongs to the spouse whose name is on it, or who earned it, unless a document says otherwise. Nine states use community property instead. Under IRS Publication 555, those states are Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. There, most property acquired during the marriage belongs to both spouses equally, no matter which one earned it.

That classification follows the property, not just the address. Colorado law presumes property acquired while a spouse lived in a community property state remains community property after the couple moves. Half of covered community property belongs to the surviving spouse automatically at the first death and is not the deceased spouse's to give away. The other half passes under the deceased spouse's will or, if there is none, the state's default rules. A will written as if one spouse owned everything can misstate who owns what.

What the August change fixed

Before August 12, Colorado's act applied only when the spouse who died was living in Colorado at death. That left a gap. Consider a generic example: a couple spends their working years in California, buys a Colorado home with earnings from those years, then moves again before the first spouse dies. Under the old wording, that house could fall outside the act entirely, even though it was bought with community property.

The amended law removes that condition for real estate. It now covers real property in Colorado that is traceable to community property, or was bought with it, under the law of the state where either spouse lived when the property was acquired or became community property — regardless of where the deceased spouse lived at death. Income, rent, profit, and appreciation from that property are covered on the same terms.

Why a label on a house changes the tax bill

Classification also decides the survivor's income tax position if the home is later sold. Under federal law, 26 U.S.C. § 1014(b)(6), when one spouse dies, both halves of community property get a new tax basis at fair market value — a full step-up. Ordinary joint tenancy property gets only half that treatment: the deceased spouse's half steps up, and the survivor keeps the original, often much lower, basis on their own half. On a home held for decades, that difference can be a large capital gains bill that better paperwork would have prevented.

The catch is proof. A deed rarely says whether the purchase money was community property, and years later a family may have to reconstruct where it came from. The firm's advice was to document how a Colorado property was acquired while the records still exist.

The federal change that does not fix any of this

The same announcement noted a second 2026 change, this one federal. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, set the federal estate and gift tax exemption at $15 million per person — $30 million for a married couple — for deaths in 2026, up from $13.99 million in 2025, with indexing beginning in 2027 and no scheduled expiration. That helps the few estates near those figures. For everyone else it changes nothing about the documents: as the firm put it, a higher exemption does not update a beneficiary form, move a house into a trust, name a guardian, or appoint an agent under a power of attorney.

Thomas N. Scheffel, the firm's founder, summarized the pattern this way: "Most of the problems that surface after a death trace back to a plan that was sound when it was signed and then left alone."

If you have moved since you signed your plan

Four checks cover most of the risk. First, list every state you and your spouse have lived in during the marriage, and note which assets were acquired in each. Second, pull the deed and purchase records for any post-move real estate, and write down where the money came from. Third, re-read your will, trust, powers of attorney, and beneficiary forms against your current address and current law, not the law of the state you left. Fourth, make the whole file findable, so no one has to reconstruct your moving history from a closing binder.

That last step is the one families skip. Keeping the inventory — accounts, deeds, policies, and the note explaining which property came from which state — in one place, such as Relative Ease's free locker, alongside its directory of licensed estate planning attorneys by state, costs an afternoon. Reconstructing it after a death costs far more.

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