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Younger Adults Now More Likely to Have a Will, According to Survey
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Home » Younger Adults Now More Likely to Have a Will, According to Survey

Younger Adults Now More Likely to Have a Will, According to Survey

March 1, 2021 by Juliana O'Neill

A new survey has found that motivated in part by the coronavirus pandemic, younger adults are now more likely to have a will than middle-aged adults. Nevertheless, the overall percentage of Americans with a will has dropped over the past several years.  

Caring.com’s 2021 estate planning survey found that for the first time since the survey began in 2015, 18- to 34-year-olds are more likely to have a will than 35- to 54-year-olds, with 26.8 percent in the younger cohort saying they have estate planning documents compared to 22.5 percent in the older group. Some 35 percent of all 18- to 34-year-olds responded that they were motivated by COVID-19 to start the estate planning process, leading to a 63 percent increase in the number of young adults with a will than pre-pandemic. 

The pandemic did not have the same effect on middle-aged and older adults. The survey found that the number of people aged 35 and up with estate planning documents went down this year, continuing a trend. The number of 35- to 54-year-olds with a will has decreased by 39 percent since 2019 and the number of people aged 55 or older with a will shrank 27 percent. While the overall percentage of respondents with a will in 2021 remains basically unchanged from 2020, the number of respondents with a will dropped from 40 percent in 2019 to 32.9 percent in 2021. 

The most common reason respondents gave for why they did not have a will was that they “haven’t gotten around to it,” (34.2 percent), followed by they “don’t have enough assets” (28.1 percent). The number of respondents saying they didn’t know how to get a will increased from 6.3 percent to 7.6 percent, but the percentage of people citing the expense as an excuse fell from 6.8 percent to 5.6 percent.

For the full survey results, click here.

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Juliana O'Neill
Juliana O'Neill
Juliana R. O'Neill has spent her entire career helping Virginia and DC families. She began her practice by litigating family law cases of all kinds, from divorce to custody. Her background as a family law attorney has led her to be particularly sensitive to her estate planning clients' concerns when it comes to personal, family issues. Her primary focus is to protect her clients from the consequences she saw in her family law cases.
Juliana O'Neill
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About Juliana O'Neill

Juliana R. O'Neill has spent her entire career helping Virginia and DC families. She began her practice by litigating family law cases of all kinds, from divorce to custody. Her background as a family law attorney has led her to be particularly sensitive to her estate planning clients' concerns when it comes to personal, family issues. Her primary focus is to protect her clients from the consequences she saw in her family law cases.

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