Made a Will or Trust online? What happens next in Michigan

If you made a Will online

Michigan spells out how a Will is executed. Under MCL 700.2502, a Will is in writing, signed by you (or for you, at your direction and in your conscious presence), and signed by at least two witnesses who saw you sign or acknowledge it; a Will that is dated, with your signature and its material portions in your handwriting, is valid as a holographic Will. A Will can be made self-proved before a notary (MCL 700.2504). A document you only downloaded is not yet a Will.

Add the self-proving affidavit if you can. Under MCL 700.2504, a notarized self-proving affidavit lets the probate court accept the Will without tracking down your witnesses years later — a small step now that saves your family real friction.

A Will does not avoid probate. It is the instruction sheet FOR probate — the court process that moves what you owned to the people you named. If avoiding probate was the goal, that is a different tool.

The original document matters. Whoever holds your Will forwards it to the probate court with reasonable promptness after your death (MCL 700.2516), and during your life you may deposit it with the probate court of your county for safekeeping (MCL 700.2515). Someone you trust needs to know it exists and where it is — a PDF in an app only you can open does not meet the moment.

If you made a Trust online

Check how it was made. Michigan creates a trust only when a settlor with capacity indicates an intention to create it, there is a definite beneficiary, the trustee has duties to perform, and the same person is not both sole trustee and sole beneficiary (MCL 700.7402); an oral trust needs clear and convincing evidence (MCL 700.7407). If anything about your online Trust's signing is unclear, raise it first with a Michigan attorney.

Funding is the step most people never finish. A Trust only controls assets that are titled in its name (or that name it by beneficiary designation). Signing creates the container; funding fills it. Unfunded assets generally go through probate anyway — the exact outcome the Trust was bought to avoid.

You will want a certification of Trust. Under MCL 700.7913, banks and brokerages can accept a short certification instead of reading the whole document — it proves the Trust exists and who the trustee is while keeping the private terms private.

Your home and the Trust: whether to deed your home to the trustee is fact-specific — the title, any mortgage and the property tax all interact. A deed to your own trust whose sole present beneficiary is you or your spouse is not a transfer of ownership for property tax (MCL 211.27a(7)(g)). This one is genuinely a question for a Michigan attorney.

Is it actually finished? A six-question check

If you can answer yes to all six, your online document is far more likely to do its job when it matters:

1. 1Was it executed with Michigan's formalities — for a Will, signed by you and by two witnesses, or dated with your signature and its material portions in your handwriting (MCL 700.2502), ideally made self-proved (MCL 700.2504)?
2. 2For a Trust: has every intended asset been retitled into it — or given a beneficiary designation that matches the plan?
3. 3Do your beneficiary designations (life insurance, retirement accounts) agree with the document instead of quietly overriding it?
4. 4Does the person you named — personal representative or successor trustee — know they were named, and where the original is?
5. 5Are the originals stored safely AND findably — not only inside a vendor's app that you alone can open?
6. 6Has the plan been re-read after major life changes — marriage, divorce, a move into or out of Michigan, a new child?

What happens later — when someone has to use it

For a Trust, the day you die your successor trustee inherits statutory duties immediately — including two 63-day notice clocks under MCL 700.7814 — usually while grieving. The kindest thing you can do today is make sure they will know what they are holding and where to start.

That is the job TrusteeClear was built for: the free role check shows which sections of the Michigan Trust Code speak to your answers, and the organizer extracts what a signed Michigan Trust says — names, dates, provisions — with a source for each. Your successor trustee will not have to figure it out alone.