Updated August 2, 2026. Quick answer: there are four ways to make sure children from a first marriage inherit, and they run from free to expensive. Most families reach straight for a trust when the thing actually failing is a beneficiary form — which costs nothing to fix and controls more money than the will does.
Everything here assumes what is usually true: you want your spouse secure and your children provided for. Those are not in conflict, and the instruments below exist precisely because they are not.
1. Fix the beneficiary forms — free, and first
Retirement accounts and life insurance pass by designation, outside the will entirely. If the forms are wrong, no trust rescues them. And remarriage changes the rules on workplace plans automatically: your current spouse becomes the beneficiary by law unless they consent otherwise, and a prenup cannot do that job.
This is the single highest-value hour in the whole subject and it is free. Start here.
2. Life insurance — the simplest way to serve both sides at once
The structural problem in a blended family is that most assets can only go to one place at a time. Insurance solves it by creating a second pot: the house and the accounts go to your spouse, a policy pays your children, and nobody waits for anybody to die.
That last part matters more than people expect. Arrangements where children inherit only after a step-parent dies can create decades of waiting, and the resentment that grows in the gap does more family damage than the money is worth.
3. A QTIP trust — when the assets must serve both in sequence
Your spouse gets all the income for life; the remainder goes where you directed, and cannot be redirected. How a QTIP works, and the section 2044 trade-off that most descriptions omit.
The honest limitation is timing again: children inherit at the second death. Where the second spouse is close in age to the children, that is worth naming out loud while everyone is alive.
4. Give during your lifetime — the underrated one
Nothing is more certain than a gift already made. The annual exclusion allows a meaningful transfer each year per recipient without touching the lifetime exclusion, and there is no ambiguity afterwards about what you meant. The annual and lifetime figures.
What the state does if you do nothing
Two defaults will operate, and neither is likely to be what you would have chosen.
Intestacy splits your estate by formula — and the spouse’s share shrinks in blended families, which surprises people in both directions. Stepchildren are not an heir category at all unless they were adopted, however long you raised them.
The elective share lets a surviving spouse claim a statutory portion regardless of what your will says. You cannot disinherit a spouse by drafting around them, and remarriage is exactly when this bites — what the share comes to.
The conversation, which is the actually hard part
Every instrument above is mechanical. What is not mechanical is telling adult children what the plan is, and telling a new spouse the same thing, in the same terms.
Families that do this have arguments while everyone can still explain themselves. Families that do not have the same arguments later, in front of a lawyer, without the one person who could have settled it in a sentence. The documents are worth doing either way — but the conversation is what determines whether they are received as fairness or as a verdict.
Then keep it current: the designation controls, not the will, and both need revisiting after every marriage, divorce, birth and death.
Beneficiary rules from 29 U.S.C. § 1055 and 26 CFR § 1.401(a)-20; QTIP from 26 U.S.C. §§ 2056(b)(7) and 2044; exclusion figures from Rev. Proc. 2025-32. Intestacy and elective-share rules are state law and vary. Read August 2026. General information, not legal advice.