By The Galecki Financial Management Team
Most estate plans are drafted by two people who assume they are planning side by side. One signs here, the other signs there, and the folder goes into a drawer. Then something shifts. A husband dies. A 30-year marriage ends. Or a woman builds a career, a home, and a portfolio on her own and never had a co-signer to begin with.
In each of those cases, paperwork that worked fine last year may not work now. And the tax code quietly treats one person very differently than it treated two.
The scale here is bigger than most people assume. LIMRA counts 11.7 million widows in the United States and projects that roughly $54 trillion of wealth moves between spouses through 2048, with more than 95% of it landing in women’s hands. Separately, research from Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family & Marriage Research finds that about 40% of Americans who divorce are 50 or older. Add the women who never married, and a very large share of the estate planning conversations we have in Fort Wayne and throughout Northeast Indiana are conversations with one decision-maker.
Why a Plan Built for Two Does Not Simply Carry Over
Marriage does a lot of quiet administrative work. Joint titling moves the house without a court. A spouse is the named agent on nearly every form. The answer to “who decides?” is obvious enough that nobody writes it down.
Take the spouse out of the picture and every one of those defaults needs a deliberate replacement. Who signs if you are in surgery? Who talks to the custodian holding your IRA? Who serves as trustee if your named trustee was your former husband, or your late husband’s brother?
These are not edge cases. They are the single most common reason an otherwise tidy plan stalls in probate court or in a hospital hallway at 2 a.m.
The Four Documents to Pull Out of the Drawer First
A current will. If you die without one in Indiana, state law decides who inherits, and the order it uses may not resemble your intentions at all. For a single woman with no children, Indiana’s intestacy rules typically send assets to parents and siblings, not to a niece you helped raise, a partner you never married, or the animal rescue you have supported for 20 years.
A durable financial power of attorney. This names the person who can pay your bills, file your taxes, and manage your accounts if you cannot. Without it, your family may need to petition an Indiana court for a guardianship, which is public, slow, and expensive.
A health care representative appointment. Indiana’s version of a health care power of attorney names the person who can speak for you on medical decisions. If your appointment still names an ex-husband, fix it this month.
A HIPAA authorization. Small document, outsized consequences. Without it, the people you have named may be told nothing at all about your condition.
If your plan includes a revocable living trust, add a fifth item: confirm the trust actually owns what you think it owns. An unfunded trust is an expensive filing cabinet.
Beneficiary Designations Outrank Your Will
This is the point that surprises people most, so it is worth stating plainly. Retirement accounts, life insurance, and transfer-on-death or payable-on-death accounts pass by contract to whoever is named on the form. Your will does not govern them. A beautifully drafted will and a stale beneficiary form is a fight your heirs may lose before it starts.
Divorce does not reliably clean this up either. Indiana law revokes certain transfer-on-death designations in favor of a former spouse once a marriage is dissolved, but employer retirement plans governed by federal law generally pay whoever is named on the form, regardless of what a state statute or a divorce decree says. If your ex-husband is still listed on your 401(k) from 2009, that is who gets it.
Pull every beneficiary form you have. Every IRA, every old 401(k), every life insurance policy, every bank account with a payable-on-death instruction. Name a primary and at least one contingent on each.
Widowhood: The Decisions That Come With Deadlines
The first year after losing a spouse is not the year for big irreversible moves. It is, however, the year several clocks start running.
The inherited retirement account decision. A surviving spouse is an eligible designated beneficiary, which means she is not subject to the 10-year drawdown rule that applies to most other heirs. She can roll the account into her own IRA and stretch Required Minimum Distributions over her own lifetime, or keep it as an inherited IRA. Which option is wiser depends on her age and whether she needs access before 59½. This is a decision worth modeling, not defaulting.
The portability election. If your husband did not use his full federal estate tax exemption, the unused portion can transfer to you, but only if an estate tax return is filed to elect it. Estates that were not otherwise required to file generally have until the fifth anniversary of the date of death to make a late election under the IRS simplified method. Five years feels generous until year four arrives.
The tax bracket shift. This one catches almost everyone. You can generally file jointly for the year your spouse dies. After that, unless you have a dependent child, you file as a single taxpayer. In 2026 the standard deduction is $16,100 for a single filer versus $32,200 for a married couple, and the 22% bracket begins at $50,401 of taxable income for a single filer versus $100,801 for a couple. Same house, same portfolio, same Required Minimum Distributions, noticeably larger tax bill. Planning ahead of that shift, sometimes with Roth conversions in the window while joint filing still applies, can matter more than any investment decision made that year.
Divorce: Anything With Your Married Name on It
A divorce decree divides property. It does not update your estate plan. That part is on you.
Start with a new will, because in most cases an old one still reflects a household that no longer exists. Revoke and replace the powers of attorney and health care documents. Retitle real estate, vehicles, and bank accounts. Confirm that any retirement account split ordered by the court was actually completed through a Qualified Domestic Relations Order and that the receiving account has your own beneficiaries named on it.
Two items women commonly overlook after a later-in-life divorce. First, if the marriage lasted at least 10 years, you may be eligible for Social Security benefits based on your ex-husband’s record, and claiming that way does not reduce anything he receives. Second, if you were relying on his employer coverage, health insurance becomes your own line item, which is worth reading alongside our article on planning for healthcare costs in retirement.
Single by Choice or by Circumstance: Building Your Own Bench
For women who have always been financially independent, the gap is rarely money. It is personnel.
There is no default person. So you name them, in writing: an agent under your power of attorney, a health care representative, a personal representative for your estate, a successor trustee. Choose people younger than you where you can, name backups for each role, and consider a corporate or professional fiduciary if the natural candidates are thin or geographically distant. Then tell them. A named agent who learns about the job during a crisis is at a serious disadvantage.
Single women also tend to have more freedom in where their assets ultimately go, which makes charitable planning genuinely interesting rather than an afterthought. Qualified Charitable Distributions from an IRA after age 70½, donor-advised funds, and charitable beneficiary designations on retirement accounts can each do real work. And because there is no spouse to absorb the cost of an extended illness, long-term care planning deserves a harder look than it usually gets.
The 2026 Federal Numbers, and Why Indiana Changes the Math
The federal estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer tax exemption is $15 million per person in 2026, or $30 million for a married couple. Under current law that amount is permanent and indexed for inflation, with no scheduled sunset. The annual gift tax exclusion holds at $19,000 per recipient.
Indiana repealed its inheritance tax for deaths occurring after December 31, 2012, and the state has no separate estate tax.
Put those two facts together and the conclusion for most Indiana families is straightforward: your estate plan is almost certainly not a tax document. It is a control document. It decides who is in charge, who receives what, how quickly, and whether your family spends the year after your death in a lawyer’s office or not. That is worth doing well whether your estate is $500,000 or $15 million.
Where a Fee-Only Advisor Fits
We do not draft legal documents. Estate attorneys do that, and we work alongside several good ones in Fort Wayne. What we do is confirm the financial side actually matches the legal side: beneficiary forms that agree with the will, account titling that agrees with the trust, cash flow projections that show whether the plan holds up over a 30-year retirement, and tax modeling for the years when filing status changes.
As a Fee-Only firm in Fort Wayne, Indiana, we are compensated only for our time. We do not sell products and we earn no commissions, which removes a meaningful set of conflicts from the conversation. For women who have spent a lifetime being sold to, that difference tends to register quickly. You can read more about how our Fee-Only advisors work with women building wealth, or review our services to see what a first conversation covers.
If your last review predates a death, a divorce, a move, or a grandchild, you are overdue.
Let’s Review Your Plan Together
Bring the folder from the drawer. We can walk through what still fits, what needs a fresh signature, and what should be modeled before you decide.
To schedule a meeting, call (260) 436-8525 or email [email protected]. You can also contact us here or meet our team first.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does my will control my IRA and 401(k)?
Generally, no. Retirement accounts pass to whoever is named on the beneficiary form, and that designation takes priority over your will. Life insurance and transfer-on-death accounts work the same way. This is why reviewing beneficiary forms is the fastest, highest-value hour in estate planning.
How long do I have to elect portability after my husband dies?
If the estate was not otherwise required to file an estate tax return, the IRS simplified method generally allows a late portability election on or before the fifth anniversary of the date of death. A Form 706 still has to be filed to make the election, so it is worth discussing early rather than in year five.
Does an Indiana divorce automatically remove my ex-husband from my beneficiary forms?
Partly, and that partial coverage is the problem. Indiana law revokes certain transfer-on-death designations in favor of a former spouse upon dissolution, but employer-sponsored retirement plans are governed by federal law and generally pay the person named on the form. Update every designation yourself rather than relying on the decree.
Do I still need a trust if Indiana has no estate tax?
Sometimes, though rarely for tax reasons. Trusts are most useful when you want to avoid probate, keep the details of your estate private, provide for a beneficiary who should not receive a lump sum, or arrange for management of your assets if you become incapacitated. Whether one fits your situation is a conversation to have with an estate attorney and your advisor together.
Who makes financial decisions for me if I am single and become incapacitated?
Only the person you have named in a durable financial power of attorney. Without that document, someone has to petition an Indiana court to be appointed guardian, which is public, costly, and slower than families anticipate. Naming an agent and a backup agent takes one appointment.
About Galecki Financial Management
At Galecki Financial Management, we help individuals and families confidently pursue their financial goals. We’re anything but a business-as-usual wealth management firm. We’re different. Friendly. Casual. And really good listeners. Indeed, that’s a big part of what makes us different. Everything we do is based on what we hear from you, because our experienced team of professionals specializes in comprehensive financial planning, cash flow analysis, IRA rollovers, financial services, money management, estate planning, retirement planning, and advising. We help you identify your short- and long-term goals, and then we work together to pursue them. Lastly, and most importantly, we’re Fee-Only, meaning we’re only compensated for our time. Our only incentive is to help you succeed.