If you aren’t of substantial means, it’s still plenty easy to list beneficiaries on your financial assets. Commonplace of course to have beneficiaries listed on insurance policies, annuities and IRA accounts. But you can also list TOD, transfer on death for your bank accounts, savings accounts, investments. You can’t TOD a house, physical assets, but most people’s net worth is in liquid type assets.
Furthermore, beneficiary designations and transfer on death are senior in rights to a written will. AND, requires NO probate.
If you inherit via bene or tod, all you need is a death cert and a valid form of identification! Easy peasy...
You can in WA state. We just recorded TOD deeds on all our properties.
My mom put her house in a lady bird deed. Too many kids to make it go smoothly, but she tried and we settled it without lawyers. I”m now on a 2 year break from the sister that cried her way to a bargain basement sale of the house.
I put my house in a lady bird deed also. I did that right after the cancer diagnosis. Now when stuff is done around my house by our boys, I let them make the decisions...we laughinly refer to decisions needing to be made by “current homeowner (me)’ and “future homeowners (them). It’s a big relief. Best part is, I did it myself, all I had to pay were filing fees at the registrar’s office.