It's expected to leave your estate to your siblings if you don't have kids???
That's news to me, and in my case, it's so not happening.
It's common to leave things to your closest living relatives, yes. Your state will have "intestacy" laws that make this explicit for people who die without wills. Here in Washington if you're married when you die your spouse will get all the community property. Otherwise your kids (or grandkids if your kids predeceased you) are next in line to split the pot. Your parents are next in line, then your siblings, then more distant relatives (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins). In this sense everyone has a will, it's just that if you don't bother to write it down they go with the default imposed by the state. If you don't want stuff going to your siblings, make sure to write that down.
Yes, I have a will because I know what happens otherwise. I just didn't know it was *expected*, as no one in my family on either side has ever done this, DH's either. Some kid-free folks have left money to nieces/nephews, but never to siblings. I've just personally never seen it.
I think that it use to be pretty common (and maybe even legally required) in many farm families like @Imma mentioned. It was a way to preserve the large acreage in one family unit for current and future heirs rather then be parcelled out and sold to multiple developers. So it was often parcelled out to various children or siblings if their were no kids and often bound up legally so they couldn't sell it to anyone but family.
Otherwise I think you are right that most people without kids themselves leave it to nieces and nephews (unless siblings are much younger) or charity if they don't have other family.
Yes, nieces and nephews are also pretty common, but we don't have any. So that's why we ended up with siblings. From a biological point of view it's still possible (but not likely) we could get nieces or nephews on my side, but not on Mr Imma's side. If we ever do have them, we could put them in our will, but as a childless person myself, I would kind of feel bad favoring the children of one of my siblings over my childless siblings or my in-laws.
So far, in my family leaving an inheritance to nieces and nephews has only happened when the parents were already deceased, but if the siblings are older and established and don't really need the inheritance, and nieces and nephews are just starting out, it makes a lot of sense to leave the money to them directly instead of their parents. We are in our 30s and when we wrote our will we were thinking of "what do we want to happen if we die tomorrow". I am the oldest, my siblings are a bit younger and not well off. Things may be different when we are all in our 50s and 60s and approaching retirement with paid-off homes. But as Mr Imma is my first heir, and he's healthy while I have a lifelong illness, the odds of me surviving him aren't that great. He can do what he wants with my money. I'd like for him to return some heirlooms to my family, pictures, jewelry and the family Bible, but he is under no moral obligation to leave them anything else.
