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Beneficiary designations are one of the simplest estate planning tools in Arizona, and one of the easiest to get wrong. A beneficiary designation lets an asset pass directly to the person you name when you die, outside of probate. That is a real advantage, but only if the form is set up correctly and kept current. This is a practical guide to doing both.

If you are looking for the bigger-picture question of whether beneficiary forms can stand in for a full estate plan, we cover that in Why Beneficiary Designations Aren't Enough in Arizona Estate Planning. This post is about getting the designations themselves right.

Every summer, thousands of Arizona students and seasonal workers start new jobs, and many of them are working for the first time. Arizona and federal law give those workers real protections, and some of them get stronger the moment school is back in session. If you are taking a back-to-school job, or you are the parent of a teen who is, here is what the law says you are owed.

Selling a business is supposed to close a chapter. For a lot of Arizona owners, it opens a new one they did not expect. The deal closes, the money clears, and a few months later there is a call from a vendor, a lender, or a former business partner about a debt the seller thought they had left behind. Whether that debt is actually yours depends on how you sold, what you signed, and what you cleaned up on the way out. Here is how that works in Arizona, and what you can do before you sign so the past stays in the past.

If you've opened a letter from your homeowners association with the words "notice of lien" or "delinquent assessments," it's easy to assume the worst — that you're about to lose your home. Take a breath. In Arizona, an HOA lien is the start of a process with real protections built in for you, and a 2025 change in the law moved those protections further in homeowners' favor. Here's what a lien actually means, what your association can and can't do with it, and how to push back.

Estate planning for graduates is one of the conversations Arizona families most often skip and most often regret skipping, because the legal shift that happens on a child's eighteenth birthday is immediate, automatic, and largely invisible until something goes wrong. On the day a child turns 18 in Arizona, parents lose the legal authority to make medical decisions, access medical records, manage financial accounts, or speak with the child's school about anything substantive. The child is an adult under Arizona law and is treated that way by hospitals, banks, universities, and government agencies, regardless of who is paying tuition or carrying the health insurance.

Short-term rentals in HOAs are one of the most misunderstood areas of Arizona property law, largely because two separate legal frameworks are operating at the same time and people frequently confuse them. Arizona has strong state preemption that prevents cities and counties from banning short-term rentals, but that preemption does not touch private restrictions in HOA declarations. The result is that an Arizona homeowner can be fully compliant with state law and city licensing requirements and still be in clear violation of the recorded CC&Rs governing their community.

A mid-year contract review is one of the most useful and most overlooked things an Arizona business owner can do, especially as summer approaches and disputes tend to surface from contracts that were signed months earlier and never revisited. By the time a vendor stops performing, a client refuses to pay, or an independent contractor pushes back on scope, the relevant contract is usually exactly as it was when it was signed. The work to prevent that dispute had to happen earlier. Mid-year is the natural checkpoint.

Non-compete and non-solicit agreements come up constantly in Arizona, and most people on both sides of one have the same basic question: does this thing actually hold up? The short answer is that Arizona enforces these agreements, but only when they are reasonable in time, geography, and the activity restricted, and only when they protect a real business interest beyond keeping a former worker out of the market.