Common Disaster Clause

When a husband and wife die in the same car accident, or when a parent and adult child die within hours of each other, the order of death has cascading consequences. Under the default rules, a beneficiary who outlives the testator by a single second can inherit. The estate then passes through that beneficiary's own plan to a different set of people. A common disaster clause replaces those default rules with a chosen outcome — usually a 30-, 60-, or 120-hour survival requirement.

Families include a common disaster clause to keep the distribution predictable. Without it, accidents can route the estate through a young spouse's family of origin instead of through the children, or through an estranged in-law instead of through the surviving siblings.

Arizona follows the Uniform Simultaneous Death Act under ARS § 14-2702, which imposes a default 120-hour survival requirement for most non-probate and probate transfers. The statute applies unless the governing instrument expressly varies it. A common disaster clause typically does vary the default — for example, by requiring 30 days of survival for spouses while leaving 120 hours in place for everyone else.

Documents that include a common disaster clause typically contain language along these lines: "If my spouse and I die in circumstances making it impossible to determine the order of our deaths, or if my spouse fails to survive me by 30 days, my spouse shall be deemed to have predeceased me for all purposes of this will." Descriptive only.

• 120-hour default. The will defers to ARS § 14-2702's 120-hour rule.
• 30-day spousal survival. A longer survival window for the spouse only.
• Asymmetric survival. The wealthier spouse's plan applies a long survival period; the less wealthy spouse's plan applies the default.

The most common failure is forgetting the marital deduction's six-month rule. A common disaster clause that requires the spouse to survive more than six months can disqualify the bequest from the federal estate tax marital deduction. A second failure is inconsistent windows across documents — a 30-day rule in the will paired with a 120-hour rule in the trust. A third pitfall is omitting the clause entirely and letting whichever set of in-laws happens to outlast the others by a heartbeat inherit by accident.