Estate Planning
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40 free Estate Planning trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Estate planning sounds dry until you see what happens without it. Fortunes have been tied up in court for years, families have fallen out over a single sheet of paper, and juries have been asked to decide what a dead relative really meant. Behind every one of those stories sits the same small set of documents and legal ideas. This quiz covers both sides. About half the questions deal with the vocabulary and the mechanics: who does what when a will is carried out, how trusts work, what the Latin and Law French terms mean, how spouses and children are protected, and where tax comes in. The rest are stories: writers, musicians, tycoons and film stars whose last wishes made headlines, along with a few wills from history and fiction. It suits law and finance students revising succession law, advisers who want an icebreaker for a client seminar, and anyone who has been meaning to sort out their own paperwork. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing a little more than when you started.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Whose will, signed in Paris in 1895, left most of his fortune to fund annual international prizes?
Alfred Nobel
Alfred Nobel signed the will at the Swedish-Norwegian Club without telling his family, setting aside 94% of his assets for the awards.
Q 02Which English playwright's will famously left his wife, Anne, his second-best bed?
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare added the bed in a line squeezed between others, while his daughter Susanna and her husband received most of his goods.
Q 03Which Minneapolis music star died in 2016 with no will, leaving six siblings to claim his estate?
Prince
Prince left no will that anyone could find, so a trust company was given temporary control of his estate, and it had his vault drilled open.
Q 04New York hotel magnate Leona Helmsley's will left a $12 million trust fund to which beneficiary, named Trouble?
Her Maltese dog
Her Maltese dog outlived Helmsley by three years, though a judge cut the fund to $2 million and two grandchildren she had disinherited won $6 million.
Q 05Where was Aretha Franklin's handwritten 2014 will found, a document a Michigan jury ruled valid in 2023?
Under a couch cushion
Under a couch cushion is where her niece came across it in 2019, a year after the singer died without a formal typed will.
Q 06Which model's claim to her late oil-tycoon husband's fortune reached the United States Supreme Court twice?
Anna Nicole Smith
Anna Nicole Smith won at the Supreme Court in 2006, but in 2011, four years after her death, the justices ruled against her estate in Stern v. Marshall.
Q 07Which British scientist who never visited America left his fortune to found a Washington institution named after him?
James Smithson
James Smithson first left everything to a nephew, and only when the nephew died childless in 1835 did the money pass to the United States.
Q 08Which newspaper publisher's will gave Columbia University the money to launch American journalism's most famous prizes?
Joseph Pulitzer
Joseph Pulitzer's gift also paid for Columbia's journalism school, which opened in 1912, five years before the first awards were handed out.
Q 09Which Hollywood star's will left the bulk of her estate to her acting teacher, Lee Strasberg?
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe's gift moved on again when Strasberg died in 1982, passing to his third wife, Anna, whom he had married only after the star's death.
Q 10Which author's last instructions told his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished manuscripts, a request Brod ignored?
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka's wish went unheeded, and Brod published the novels and collected works between 1925 and 1935 to eventual acclaim.
Q 11Which court process for validating a will takes its name from the Latin verb meaning 'to prove'?
Probate
Probate has meant the official proving of a will since at least 1463, and where no valid will exists the same court applies default inheritance laws.
Q 12Which person named in a will pays the estate's debts and distributes what is left, as its personal representative?
Executor
Executor is the title only when a will makes the appointment; if there is no will, or nobody named agrees to act, an administrator is appointed instead.
Q 13Which legal word describes someone like Pablo Picasso, who died in 1973 having never made a will?
Intestate
Intestate estates are divided by statute instead of the owner's wishes, and Picasso's heirs feuded while France collected its death duties in artworks.
Q 21Which marital system, used in California and Texas, treats assets acquired during marriage as owned by both spouses?
Community property
Community property covers what a couple acquires while married, whereas gifts and inheritances received by one spouse stay that spouse's own.
Q 22Which US state, the only one built on civil law, restricts parents from disinheriting children aged 23 or younger?
Louisiana
Louisiana calls the system forced heirship, a phrase borrowed from Spanish law, and it also protects older children who are permanently incapacitated.
Q 23Which will provision, known in Latin as 'in terrorem', threatens to disinherit any heir who challenges it in court?
No-contest clause
Q 14Which formal amendment to an existing will takes its name from a Latin word for a small writing tablet?
Codicil
Codicil comes from codicillus, a diminutive of codex, and it can alter, explain, add to or subtract from a will, short of revoking it completely.
Q 15Which type of will, written entirely by hand, did a trapped Saskatchewan farmer scratch into his tractor fender in 1948?
Holographic
Holographic wills are handwritten and signed by their maker, and after the farmer died the fender itself was accepted as his valid will.
Q 16Which document lets a chosen agent handle someone's finances, and is called 'durable' if it outlasts incapacity?
Power of attorney
Power of attorney ends at the signer's death, and without a durable one a family may have to ask a court to impose a guardianship.
Q 17Which document, despite its name, distributes nothing and records the medical care a person wants if incapacitated?
Living will
Living will was coined because the document takes effect while its maker is alive but unable to decide, and it is the oldest form of advance directive.
Q 18Which Latin phrase meaning 'by roots' sends a dead heir's portion of an estate down to that heir's own descendants?
Per stirpes
Per stirpes treats each branch of a family as one unit, so three grandchildren would split their late parent's third instead of each taking an equal cut.
Q 19Which doctrine with feudal roots hands a dead person's property to the government when no will and no heirs exist?
Escheat
Escheat originally returned land to the feudal lord above when a tenant died without an heir or was convicted of a felony.
Q 20Which feature of joint tenancy passes a dead co-owner's interest straight to the other owners, whatever a will says?
Right of survivorship
Right of survivorship is what separates joint tenancy from a tenancy in common, where a dead owner's interest passes through the estate to heirs.
No-contest clause threats lose their bite in many US states, which refuse to enforce them against a challenger who had probable cause.
Q 24In trust law, which term names the person who places assets into a trust, also known as a grantor or trustor?
Settlor
Settlor comes from 'settling' assets on someone, and the same person may also act as trustee by declaring that they hold their own assets in trust.
Q 25Which US tax break resets an inherited asset's cost to its value at the owner's death, shrinking any capital gains bill?
Step-up in basis
Step-up in basis means an heir who sells straight away may owe almost nothing, because gains built up during the owner's lifetime escape income tax.
Q 26Which principle, applied in New York's 1889 case Riggs v. Palmer, bars a murderer from inheriting from the victim?
Slayer rule
Slayer rule reasoning stopped 16-year-old Elmer Palmer, who had poisoned his grandfather for fear that the old man would change his will.
Q 27Which common-law doctrine stops a will from controlling property beyond a 'life in being plus twenty-one years'?
Rule against perpetuities
Rule against perpetuities exists so the dead cannot steer who owns land long after everyone alive when they wrote the document has gone.
Q 28A payable-on-death bank account is nicknamed which kind of trust, after a 1904 New York court case?
Totten
Totten trusts take their name from Matter of Totten, in which New York's top court approved accounts titled 'in trust for' a named person.
Q 29Which doctrine with a Law French name lets a court redirect a charitable trust whose purpose has become impossible?
Cy-près
Cy-près means 'so close', because the court must choose a new purpose as near as possible to what the donor originally intended.
Q 30Which doctrine means a classic car left in a will passes to nobody if the owner sold it before dying?
Ademption
Ademption, also called ademption by extinction, treats a specific gift as having failed once the item is no longer part of the estate.