Will requirements in Alabama

Alabama applies the standard rule: you must have reached 18 and be of sound mind when you sign. Sound mind is a lower bar than people expect — it asks whether you understood roughly what you owned, who your natural heirs were, and what the document was doing, at the moment you signed it. A diagnosis alone does not settle the question.

No Alabama will needs a notary to be valid. What a notary gets you is a self-proving affidavit — a sworn statement signed by you and both witnesses at the same time, notarized, and attached to the will.

The payoff comes years later. Without it, your executor may have to track down your witnesses and get them to testify that they watched you sign. People move, lose touch, and die. A self-proving affidavit lets the will be admitted without any of that, which is why it is worth the extra ten minutes at signing.

A handwritten, unwitnessed will executed in Alabama is not valid here. The only way such a document is accepted is if it was properly executed somewhere that does recognize holographic wills — someone who wrote a valid handwritten will while living in Texas, then moved to Alabama, is the situation this rule covers.

If you are in Alabama now, treat handwriting as a draft. It needs two witnesses before it becomes a will.

Alabama has a summary distribution procedure that lets a small estate avoid full administration. We are deliberately not printing a number here: the threshold is inflation-adjusted and the figures circulating in secondary sources differ materially from one another, so any single number risks being wrong or stale by the time you rely on it.

The county probate court holds the current figure and will tell you. That is a short phone call, and it is more reliable than any summary written months earlier.

Alabama is a common law property state. Property is owned by whoever holds title, rather than being split automatically between spouses because it was acquired during the marriage.

Alabama does protect a surviving spouse through an elective share, so you cannot fully disinherit a husband or wife by will alone. If your plan involves leaving a spouse substantially less than they would otherwise receive, that is a conversation to have with an attorney before signing.

Alabama's Advance Directive for Health Care combines a living will with the appointment of a health care proxy, and it is signed before two witnesses. It governs while you are alive and unable to speak for yourself — which is exactly when a will does nothing at all.

For financial matters you will want a separate durable power of attorney. Alabama has not adopted the Uniform Power of Attorney Act, so its form and the way institutions treat it differ from UPOAA states; a bank in another state may scrutinise an Alabama document more closely.