Providing for a second spouse and children

If you leave your entire estate to your second spouse outright, they legally own it and can do whatever they want with it, including leaving it all to their own children, a new partner, or anyone else, regardless of what you discussed while you were alive. Your children from a previous relationship have no automatic claim to what remains.

This is why 'I trust them to do the right thing' is not the same as a legal guarantee. Even the most well-intentioned spouse can remarry, change their mind, or simply die without updating their own will to reflect the arrangement you had in mind.

A common solution is a life interest trust, sometimes called an interest in possession trust, set up in your will. This allows your spouse to live in the family home and receive income from other assets for the rest of their life, while the underlying capital is preserved and passes to your children when your spouse later dies.

This structure protects your spouse's security during their lifetime while making sure your children eventually inherit, rather than losing out entirely if your spouse remarries or changes their will. Trusts like this need careful drafting by a solicitor to work as intended, including choosing trustees who will manage the arrangement fairly between your spouse and your children.

Some couples in second marriages make mirror wills, near-identical wills that each leave everything to the survivor and then to the same list of beneficiaries after that. This works well for couples with only shared children, but for blended families it has a serious weakness: nothing stops the surviving spouse rewriting their own will after the first death, cutting out the deceased's children entirely.

If protecting your children's inheritance matters to you, mirror wills without a trust structure do not achieve that. You need either a trust in your will, or a mutual wills agreement, which is a binding contract not to change the wills, though this is a more unusual and legally complex route best discussed with a solicitor.

Whatever balance you strike, be aware that both a spouse and a financially dependent child can potentially bring a claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 if they believe your will (or the intestacy rules) failed to make reasonable financial provision for them. A spouse's claim is judged against a broader standard than a child's, and often succeeds more readily.

This does not mean you cannot make choices that favour one side of the family, but it does mean extreme imbalances, especially leaving a spouse with nowhere to live, carry a higher risk of a successful claim after your death. Getting the balance broadly fair, and explaining your reasoning in a letter of wishes, reduces that risk.

Trust structures, mutual wills agreements, and balancing competing family interests all involve legal mechanisms that a standard online will template is not built to handle. Getting the trust wording wrong can mean it fails to achieve what you intended, or creates unnecessary tax complications.

If your family situation matches what is described in this guide, a second marriage with children from an earlier relationship, and you want your children to eventually inherit rather than simply hoping for the best, take advice from a solicitor who specialises in wills and trusts. It is one of the clearest cases where paying more delivers real protection.