Marrying at 60 With Children From Before

Getting married again at sixty does more to your children's inheritance than most people expect, and it happens before the confetti has settled. The wedding itself revokes the will you already have, and once the will is gone the intestacy rules step in and put your new spouse ahead of your children — even adult children you have provided for all their lives. The change is legal, automatic, and easy to miss.

That is not an argument against marrying. It is an argument for doing one specific thing quickly afterwards. Marriage revokes an existing will in England, Wales and Northern Ireland unless the will was made in expectation of that marriage, so the document you thought was looking after your children is very often cancelled by the ceremony without anyone noticing.

Until you make a new will, the intestacy rules decide who gets what. Those rules are written for a first marriage with shared children. Dropped onto a later-life remarriage, they hand your new husband or wife a large fixed sum and half of what is left, and reduce your own children to sharing whatever remains after that. Adult, independent, grown-up children are treated no differently.

The short answer: the wedding rewrites your inheritance, not just your will

People tend to think of a will as a document that sits quietly until they choose to change it. A wedding changes it for you. The moment you marry, an earlier will is treated as revoked, as though you had torn it up, unless it contains specific wording saying it was made in contemplation of marrying that particular person. Most wills made before a relationship existed contain no such wording, because the relationship had not started when they were signed.

So the day after a later-life wedding, two things are commonly true at once. You feel more settled and provided-for than ever. And you have, without realising it, died-intestate-in-waiting: if anything happened now, the law, not your old will, would decide who inherits. For a second marriage with children from before, that gap is exactly where inheritances go astray.

What the intestacy rules give a new spouse ahead of your children

When someone dies without a valid will in England and Wales, leaving a spouse and children, the estate is divided by a set formula. The surviving spouse receives all the personal possessions, a fixed cash sum known as the statutory legacy, and half of whatever is left above that. The children share the other half between them. Nothing in the formula asks how old the children are, whether they are the spouse's children too, or what you would have wanted.

The statutory legacy is the figure that does most of the work, because on many estates it swallows the bulk of what there is before the children see anything at all.

Source: gov.uk, Inheritance if there is no will. The statutory legacy in England and Wales has been £322,000 since 26 July 2023, set by the Administration of Estates Act 1925 (Fixed Net Sum) Order 2023.

Work an example through and the effect is stark. On an estate below the statutory legacy, the spouse takes everything and the children receive nothing under intestacy. On an estate a little above it, the spouse takes the legacy plus half the small surplus, and the children divide the modest remainder. The house, if it was in your sole name, forms part of that estate and is caught by the same split. This is the mechanism behind so many stories of children from a first marriage being unintentionally cut out, and it is set out step by step in our piece on how, with no will, your children inherit at eighteen and nothing before.

There is a further layer that intensifies the effect, and it concerns the home. If you own your house jointly with your new spouse as joint tenants, it does not pass under the intestacy rules at all: it goes to the survivor automatically by survivorship, outside the will and outside the estate that gets divided. So the largest asset most couples own can skip your children entirely, on top of the statutory legacy taking the bulk of what remains. Whether the home passes this way or forms part of the divisible estate turns on how the title is held, which is why couples in this position are often advised to check, and sometimes to change, the way the property is owned before doing anything else.

The rules differ elsewhere in the UK. Northern Ireland has its own statutory legacy figures, and Scotland does not use this system at all — it applies prior rights and legal rights instead, and a Scottish will is not even revoked by the marriage in the first place. If your estate or your home is in Scotland, the English formula above is the wrong one to plan around.

Why "it will pass to my children eventually" does not hold

The most common plan in a second marriage is the informal one: leave everything to each other, and trust that when the survivor dies it will find its way to both sets of children. It rarely works, and the reasons are structural rather than a matter of anyone behaving badly.

When your spouse inherits from you, they inherit absolutely. It becomes their money and their house, to do with as they wish. They can make a new will leaving it to their own children and none to yours. They can remarry, which revokes their will all over again and can route your former estate to a person you never met. They can spend it, need it for care, or simply change their mind over a long widowhood. Your stepchildren, meanwhile, have no automatic claim on your estate at all — the law does not treat a stepchild as your child unless you formally adopted them.

None of this requires bad faith, and the survivor is usually free to do every bit of it. The freedom the survivor retains to rewrite everything after the first death is a subject in its own right, and we cover what does and does not constrain it in how mirror wills can be rewritten after you die. The short version is that a promise to keep to matching wills binds nobody once one of you has gone.

The two structures that provide for a spouse and your children

There are established ways to look after a new spouse and still make sure your own children receive something, and both work by separating the two goals rather than hoping one flows into the other.

The first is a life interest trust in your will. Instead of leaving the house or the capital to your spouse outright, you leave them the right to live in the property or to receive the income from investments for the rest of their life, with the underlying capital passing to your children when your spouse dies. Your spouse is secure and housed; your children are certain to inherit the capital eventually; and because your spouse never owns the capital, they cannot leave it away from your children or lose it to a later marriage.

The second is a life policy written in trust for your children. This sits entirely outside your estate. When you die, it pays the trustees for your named children directly, without waiting for probate and without being routed through your spouse first. It is the cleanest way to give your own children a defined sum that does not depend on how the rest of the estate is eventually distributed, or on the survivor's later decisions. Because the payout depends on the policy being in force and on the answers given when it was set up, the honest work is done at the application stage, where an insurer assesses your age and health through underwriting.

Getting the timing and the paperwork right

The order of events is what trips people up, so it is worth being precise. A will made before the wedding survives the wedding only if it states it is made in expectation of marriage to your named partner. Without that wording, the marriage cancels it. So you have two clean routes: make new wills after the ceremony, or make wills beforehand that expressly say they are in contemplation of the marriage. What you must not do is marry on the strength of an old will and assume it still stands.

The point about wording made before a ceremony matters just as much for couples who are engaged but have not yet married, where the interval carries its own risks; we set those out in engaged but not yet married, and what the date changes. If you are living together with children from an earlier relationship and have not married at all, the position is different again and is covered in cohabiting with children from a previous relationship.

Two things are easy to forget at the same time. Pension nominations pay outside the will entirely, at the discretion of the scheme's trustees, so an old nomination form naming a former partner needs updating whatever your will says. And any inheritance tax planning between spouses should be revisited too, especially where one of you is not long settled in the UK, a wrinkle we cover in marrying a partner who is not long-term UK resident.

Putting a figure on it, and where cover fits

If your aim is to make sure your own children receive a set amount whenever you die, the question of what kind of cover suits is a real one. Term cover ends on a fixed date, which is fine for a debt that will be gone by then but awkward for a legacy you want to arrive whenever death happens, which in later life could be well beyond any normal term. Cover designed to last for life, held in trust for your children, is the shape people generally use for this purpose, because the point is not to bridge a temporary gap but to guarantee a specific sum reaches a specific person.

Sizing it is a matter of deciding what you want each child to receive and setting the sum assured to match, then holding it in trust so it bypasses your estate and the survivor. If you would like to see how that works for your own family, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker price and structure it. It is worth reading the wider set of later-life money questions in our hub on life events that change who depends on you, since remarriage rarely arrives on its own — a mortgage still running into retirement, for example, changes the sums again.

Frequently asked questions

Does remarrying change what my children inherit?

Substantially. Marriage revokes your existing will in England, Wales and Northern Ireland unless it was made in expectation of that marriage, so unless you make a new one the intestacy rules apply. Those give your spouse your personal belongings, a statutory legacy of £322,000 and half of the remainder, with your children sharing only what is left. Adult children get no special treatment. Scotland works differently and does not revoke the will on marriage.

How can I provide for a new spouse and my children?

The common routes are a life interest trust in the will, which lets your spouse live in the property or take the income while the capital passes to your children afterwards, or a policy written in trust that pays your children directly. Both separate what your spouse needs to live on from what your children are meant to inherit, so one does not quietly consume the other.

Should we make new wills before or after the wedding?

A will made before the wedding survives it only if it says it is made in expectation of marriage to that named person. Otherwise, make new wills afterwards, and update pension nominations at the same time, because those pay outside the will entirely and at the trustees' discretion. Marrying on the strength of an old will, without that wording, leaves you relying on the intestacy rules.