## Facts

- Karen J. Myers died on November 2, 2009; her will was admitted to probate in the Iowa District Court for Hamilton County.
- Karen’s will left her surviving spouse, Howard Myers, essentially household furnishings, with the remainder passing to her daughters and a stepson.
- Karen held three pay-on-death (POD) assets naming her daughters as beneficiaries: a checking account, a certificate of deposit, and an annuity.
- The checking account and certificate of deposit (combined) were valued at approximately $91,085.71; the annuity was valued at approximately $18,978.80.
- Howard filed for a statutory elective share on June 30, 2010, and later assigned his elective-share rights to judgment creditors to satisfy a restitution judgment.
- The assignees asked the probate court to include the POD assets in the elective share, arguing Karen retained control over those assets during life.
- The probate court agreed and included the POD assets in the elective share, relying on a prior decision extending elective-share protection against certain will substitutes.
- The estate’s executor, Rex A. Picken (Karen’s brother), appealed.

## Issues

1. Whether a surviving spouse’s elective share under Iowa Code § 633.238 (Supp. 2009) includes pay-on-death (POD) assets passing by beneficiary designation.
2. Whether the 2009 amendment to § 633.238 limits the elective share to enumerated probate-estate categories, thereby excluding nonprobate transfers.

## Decision

- The Iowa Supreme Court reversed the probate court’s ruling and remanded.
- The court held that the 2009 amendment to Iowa Code § 633.238 controls and limits the elective share to the statute’s enumerated categories.
- Because POD assets are nonprobate transfers and are not among the listed categories, they are excluded from the elective share.
- The court rejected extending earlier case law by analogy to reach POD assets after the 2009 statutory revision.

## Legal Principles

- When a statute states an elective share “is limited to” enumerated categories, courts must treat the list as exclusive.
- POD (and, by the same reasoning, TOD) accounts transfer outside probate by beneficiary designation and are not part of the probate estate absent statutory inclusion.
- A legislative amendment that narrows an elective-share statute supersedes prior judicial expansions of elective-share reach to nonprobate arrangements.
- Policy concerns about avoidance of spousal rights through nonprobate transfers are addressed by the legislature through statutory design, not by judicial supplementation inconsistent with the amended text.

## Conclusion

The court held that Iowa’s post-2009 elective-share statute confines the surviving spouse’s elective share to specified probate-estate categories and does not include POD assets, requiring reversal of an order that had brought such nonprobate assets into the elective-share calculation.


In re Estate of Myers, 825 N.W.2d 1 (Iowa 2012)