Nobody in Oregon dies without an estate plan. If you don't write one, Chapter 112 of the Oregon Revised Statutes is your plan. Lawyers call that dying intestate, which means dying without a will. The statute was written to be fair to an average family, and it has never met yours.
Here is how the state splits things up. Married with no children: your spouse takes all of it. Married with children, and all of those kids are your spouse's kids too: your spouse still takes all of it. Married with a child from an earlier relationship: your spouse takes half, and your kids split the other half. That last line is where most of the damage happens. It surprises a lot of people who assumed a long marriage had settled the question.
With no spouse, the state works down a list. Children first. Then grandchildren, if a child died before you did. No kids or grandkids, and it goes to your parents. No parents, and it goes to your brothers and sisters and their children. The state keeps working outward until it finds somebody. Oregon only keeps the money when there's nobody left to find.
The half-and-half version does something specific to a house. Your spouse lives there and now owns half of it. A stepchild owns the other half, and that stepchild can ask to be bought out. If there's no cash to buy anybody out, the choices are a new mortgage your spouse may not qualify for alone, or a sale. None of that requires anybody to behave badly. The statute created a shared ownership that neither of them picked.
Minor children add a second problem. Money can't be handed straight to a child, so the court appoints a conservator, which means an adult the judge puts in charge of that child's money. A conservatorship costs money every year: reports to the court, a bond, and fees, all paid out of the child's own funds. Then the whole balance goes to the child on their eighteenth birthday, with no strings on it at all. A judge also decides who raises them, working from whoever steps forward, because you left no name on file.
Some of your money never reads the statute at all. Retirement accounts, life insurance, and anything payable on death go to the name on the beneficiary form. That form outranks everything, including a will you write later. Property held jointly with right of survivorship, which means both names are on it and the survivor takes the whole thing, passes the same way. So the intestacy rules only cover what's left after all of that. What's left is usually the house, the vehicles, the accounts in your name alone, and your personal belongings. More on that split in why life insurance money skips probate and the five-minute beneficiary checkup.
I'm a licensed insurance broker and not an attorney, so I'm not going to tell you how to draft anything. But the fix is a short conversation with an Oregon estate attorney. Usually that means a will, a paper naming who raises your kids, and the two documents covered in power of attorney and advance directive. Update your beneficiary forms the same week. Beneficiary forms are free to change, and they move more money than the will does.