Statutory Wills

A handful of states have created their own wills within their probate laws for people to use. This a great idea in theory, but hasn't worked well in practice (which should be evident by the small number of states offering statutory wills).

As the statutes themselves usually state, statutory wills are limited as to what they can do. They are also very rigid and must be followed exactly in order to be valid. Limited usefulness and inflexibility are not the makings of a great will.

Nevertheless, statutory wills may have some usefulness to you and may be sufficient to meet your needs. As such, they are provided for your use via the links below.

• California Statutory Will
• Maine Statutory Will
• Michigan Statutory Will
• Wisconsin (Basic Will)
• Wisconsin (Basic Will With Trust)

The files are in rich text format (RTF) that is suitable for use with most word processing programs used in the Windows environment.

For more information, see our discussion of statutory wills.

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