Judging from reported figures, roughly 80-90% of households in the US [1] have a household net worth of at least $0. That means that most people do in fact have an estate.

Median household net worth is in fact somewhere in the $100k-200k range, which is definitely something that could be meaningfully called an "estate." (Most of this tends to be the house, the median net equity in which is about $190k as of 2022).

Source: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p70br...

[1] This doesn't mean "homeowners," rather it's a recognition that assets for married or cohabitating couples are usually commingled.

It’s just the legal term. If you have a relative die with a bit of stuff and an ancient car, they have an estate and someone needs to execute it even if the total value is less than most lawyers care about.

Everyone has an estate. Only thing is that you have to die first.

Ummm, not quite.

An "estate" is a legal term for property, assets, and liabilities a person leaves behind upon their death. A family member is a top practitioner in the field of estate planning and resolution, and some of the messiest estates they have handled are pro-bono cases of exactly the type of people you would put in italicized "most people": poor, not really able to upkeep a house they inherited from a relative which hadn't had title properly transferred on a previous death because they didn't have money for an attny, now can't get a loan to fix the roof...

Yeah, if you are homeless, carless, and have only the clothes on your back and a shopping cart of stuff, you don't have an estate. Everyone in the middle class in the US has an estate. Much of the time it passes automatically to their spouse on death, but it's still an estate.

And if you are concerned about where it goes, get a GOOD attny. There are many bad ones hanging out their shingle as "Trust & Estate" attnys, and some of the next messiest cases are fixing problems made by those not-so-good attnys.

And NO, AI is not good enough.