Fort Lauderdale Estate Planning Attorney

As an estate planning attorney Fort Lauderdale families work with directly, I draft the wills, revocable living trusts, durable powers of attorney and health care directives that decide who inherits what you own, who speaks for you if you cannot speak for yourself, and how much of that happens in a courtroom instead of a conference room. Florida law is unusually particular about all three, and a plan that worked perfectly in New York, New Jersey or Ohio can fail here for reasons that have nothing to do with how carefully it was written.

People usually reach an estate planning lawyer Fort Lauderdale residents recommend at a specific moment: a diagnosis, a closing on a Broward County home, a second marriage, a business partner’s death, or the discovery that a parent’s power of attorney is being refused by a bank. Whatever brings you here, the work is the same — build a document set that Florida courts, Florida title companies and Florida financial institutions will actually honor.

Searches for an estate planning attorney in Fort Lauderdale, for an estate planning attorney in Ft Lauderdale Florida, and for estate planning Fort Lauderdale generally come down to one of three needs: a first plan, a plan that has to be brought into line with Florida law after a move, or a review of documents that already exist. All three are covered below.

This page covers what a Florida estate plan contains, what Florida law requires for each document to be valid, what changes when you move here from another state, how the homestead rules affect your house, and what the work costs. If you already have documents and simply want to know whether they still work, that is a conversation worth having before anything else. And if you are still deciding whom to hire, the section on comparing Fort Lauderdale estate planning attorneys sets out the questions worth asking anyone, including me.

What a Fort Lauderdale estate plan actually contains

Most people arrive expecting a last will and testament and are surprised to learn the will is the least active document in the set. A complete estate planning package covers two entirely separate problems: what happens after you die, and what happens if you are alive but unable to sign your name. The second problem is far more common and causes far more damage when it is unaddressed.

A standard set of estate planning documents in Florida looks like this:

That last row is the one people miss. Retirement accounts, life insurance, annuities and payable-on-death bank accounts pass by beneficiary designation, not by will. A meticulously drafted will controls none of them. A great deal of what I do as a trust and estate planning attorney Fort Lauderdale clients hire is not drafting at all — it is checking that the beneficiary designations already on file actually match the plan the documents describe.

What should be included in an estate plan?

Beyond the six items above, a complete estate planning checklist for Florida includes a schedule of what you own and where it is held, written instructions for digital accounts, a HIPAA authorization so your surrogate can actually obtain records, and — if you own a business or rental property — the entity documents that govern what happens to your interest. Basic estate planning in Florida is not a stack of forms. It is a set of instruments that have to agree with each other and with the way your assets are titled.

Full service estate planning also means the work does not stop at the signature. The estate planning services Fort Lauderdale clients actually need include retitling accounts, recording deeds, correcting beneficiary forms and revisiting the plan when the law or the family changes. I cover all of it, and I say so here because a surprising number of engagements in this field end the day the documents are signed.

Moving to Florida: estate planning your old documents will not survive

This is the single most common reason people call. You retired to Broward County, brought a will and a power of attorney drafted somewhere else, and assumed the paperwork travelled with you. Some of it did. A meaningful part of it did not.

Moving to Florida and estate planning are linked more tightly than in most states, because three Florida doctrines — homestead, the elective share and personal representative eligibility — have no close equivalent where you came from. An estate planning Florida move review is not a formality; it is the step that finds the one document out of five that no longer works. It is also the cheapest engagement I offer.

Is my out-of-state will valid in Florida?

Usually, yes — with one important exception. Under section 732.502(2), Florida Statutes, a will executed by a person who was not a Florida resident at the time is valid here if it was validly executed under the law of the state or country where it was signed, unless it is a holographic will. A holographic will — handwritten and unwitnessed — is not valid in Florida even if the state where it was signed would honor it. The Fourth District Court of Appeal applied that rule in Caveglia v. Heinen, 359 So. 3d 745 (Fla. 4th DCA 2023), refusing to probate a Louisiana holographic will made by someone who died domiciled in Florida — and holding it could not even operate to revoke an earlier will. So a New Jersey will signed with two witnesses generally travels. A handwritten sheet of paper signed alone in a kitchen in Pennsylvania does not.

Validity is not the same as workability. An out of state will can be perfectly valid and still produce a bad result here, because it was drafted against a different set of rules for spouses, for real estate and for who may serve as your personal representative.

Owning property in two states adds a second layer. Real estate is governed by the law of the state where it sits, so a New York trust holding a Fort Lauderdale condominium has to satisfy Florida’s rules for that property regardless of where the document was signed — and property left in your individual name in another state can require a separate proceeding there. This is the most common reason a Broward client ends up needing a trust rather than a will.

Can I name my out-of-state son or daughter to settle my estate?

Not always, and this catches people constantly. Florida restricts who may serve as a personal representative. Under section 733.304, Florida Statutes, a non-resident of Florida is generally disqualified unless that person is an adopted child or adoptive parent of yours, related to you by lineal consanguinity, or your spouse, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, nephew or niece — or someone related by lineal consanguinity to one of those people, or the spouse of anyone otherwise qualified. A trusted friend, a business partner or a nephew’s wife living in Chicago may be exactly the right person and still be ineligible to serve.

The out-of-state will you brought with you may nominate someone Florida will not appoint. An out-of-state personal representative who does not fall inside the statute’s family categories simply cannot serve here, no matter how clearly your will names them. That is a fixable problem, but only if it is found while you are alive.

Why Florida banks reject out-of-state powers of attorney

Florida’s Power of Attorney Act, in chapter 709, part II, Florida Statutes, was rewritten effective October 1, 2011, and it changed the shape of the document substantially. Banks, brokerages and title companies in Broward County read Florida powers of attorney against Florida standards, and an instrument that looks unfamiliar gets sent to a legal department and frequently comes back refused. The refusal usually arrives at the worst possible moment — a closing, a hospital admission, a Medicaid application.

If you have moved here and your durable power of attorney was signed in another state, have it reviewed. It is the cheapest item on the list and the one most likely to fail when you need it.

Snowbirds and part-time Florida residents

If you split the year between Fort Lauderdale and somewhere north, the question underneath your estate plan is domicile — which state you actually belong to for legal purposes. Domicile drives which state’s law governs your will, whether you qualify for Florida’s homestead protections, and where your estate is administered. Filing a declaration of domicile, registering to vote, changing your driver’s license and applying for the Broward County homestead exemption all point in the same direction; keeping a homestead-equivalent tax break in another state points the opposite way and can undo the rest. Estate planning for snowbirds in Florida is largely the work of making the paperwork tell one consistent story.

Florida homestead: the rule that breaks the most plans

Your house is the asset most likely to defeat your intentions, and homestead is the reason. Article X, section 4 of the Florida Constitution does three separate things that people tend to blur together: it protects the home from most creditors, it caps property taxes, and — the part that matters here — it restricts who you may leave it to. Property that qualifies is called protected homestead, and the label carries all three consequences at once.

Can I leave my Fort Lauderdale home to my children if I am married?

Generally, no — not outright, and not by simply writing it in a will. Where a homestead owner is survived by a spouse or a minor child, Florida restricts the devise of the property. Under section 732.4015, Florida Statutes, homestead is not subject to devise if the owner is survived by a spouse or minor child, except that it may be devised to the spouse if there is no minor child. A will that leaves the house to the children of a first marriage, over a surviving second spouse, does not accomplish what it says.

What happens instead is set by section 732.401, Florida Statutes: the surviving spouse takes a life estate with the descendants taking a remainder, or the spouse may elect instead to take an undivided one-half interest as a tenant in common. That election is time-limited. A married couple in a blended family who assume a will alone will sort this out are almost always wrong, and the discovery is made by their children, in court, after both are gone.

Should I put my Florida homestead in a revocable trust?

Often yes for probate and management reasons — but not as a way around the homestead devise restriction, and this is the single most common misunderstanding I correct.

Section 732.4017, Florida Statutes provides that a lifetime transfer of homestead, including a transfer in trust, is not a devise — but only where the owner does not retain a power to revoke or revest the interest. A revocable living trust is, by definition, revocable. A transfer of homestead into your own revocable trust therefore does not qualify under that statute, and the property remains subject to the devise restrictions of section 732.4015. Section 732.4015 expressly reaches trust dispositions as well as wills.

Put plainly: putting the house in a revocable trust does not let you leave it past a surviving spouse or minor child. Anyone who tells you otherwise is describing a different state’s law. A spouse’s rights are given up by a valid waiver, not by a deed.

The related question I am asked constantly concerns the revocable trust Florida homestead exemption: will putting my house in a living trust cost me the exemption? The Florida living trust homestead exemption analysis has a good answer when the trust is drafted so the settlor retains the requisite beneficial interest, and a bad one when it is not.

This is precisely the kind of thing a downloaded trust form gets wrong silently, because nothing announces the error until a tax bill or a title objection arrives years later. If you are considering a living trust for house property that is your Florida homestead, the deed and the trust have to be drafted together, and the Broward County Property Appraiser’s exemption records should be checked afterward rather than assumed.

Can you inherit a homestead exemption in Florida?

The tax exemption is not inherited automatically. It belongs to the owner who qualified for it and who filed for it, and an heir who takes the property must qualify and apply on their own — which means occupying the property as a permanent residence. The Save Our Homes assessment cap that built up over decades of ownership generally does not transfer on a change of ownership — with important exceptions that preserve it, including transfers between spouses, transfers by operation of law to a surviving spouse or minor child, and transfers to a permanent resident who is legally or naturally dependent on the owner. An adult child who inherits and lives elsewhere is not within those exceptions. Families who plan to keep a Broward County home in the family for generations are frequently planning around a tax benefit that will not survive the transfer.

The last will and testament in Fort Lauderdale

A last will and testament is the instrument that names guardians for minor children, and for that reason alone almost every parent needs one. It also names your personal representative and directs who receives what is left after debts and expenses. What it does not do is operate outside the court system.

People arrive at this asking the same thing in several different ways. Some are creating a will and testament Fort Lauderdale families have needed for years and never got around to.

Others want what they call a final will and testament — the document a court will actually accept. Some just say they need their last will done. All three describe the same instrument, and Florida treats it the same way whichever phrase you used to find it.

Most people looking for a last will and testament Fort Lauderdale attorneys prepare are looking for something narrower than a full plan, and that is a perfectly reasonable place to start. A will attorney Fort Lauderdale residents hire for a single document should still ask about your house, your spouse and your beneficiary forms before drafting a word — because those three things determine whether the will you sign does what you think it does. The will is also the only document that names a guardian for minor children, which for parents is reason enough on its own.

Making a will in Florida is not the paperwork exercise it appears to be from the outside. Florida will laws impose three separate tests the document has to survive: it has to be executed correctly, it has to dispose of property Florida actually lets you dispose of, and it has to agree with how your assets are titled. Most self-prepared wills pass the first test and fail the other two.

What makes a will valid in Florida?

The Florida will requirements are strict and unforgiving. Under section 732.502, Florida Statutes — the Florida will statute that governs all of this — a will must be in writing, signed by the testator at the end (or by another person at the testator’s direction and in the testator’s presence), and the testator must sign, or acknowledge a prior signature, in the presence of at least two attesting witnesses.

The Florida will witness requirements are where most homemade documents come apart. Those two witnesses must sign in the presence of the testator and in the presence of each other. Every element of the Florida will execution requirements matters independently, and witnesses who sign in a different room, or one at a time an hour apart, create precisely the defect that fuels litigation years later.

So whether you are writing your last will and testament yourself or having it drafted, the requirements in Florida come to exactly that — writing, a signature at the end, and two witnesses who sign in the presence of the testator and of each other.

Florida last will and testament laws add no notary requirement for the will itself to be valid, though the self-proving affidavit described below is worth having anyway. Anyone asking who can make one here is really asking about capacity, and that is a question of understanding rather than diagnosis — the standard is set out further down.

Does a Florida will need to be notarized?

Strictly speaking the Florida will notary requirements are separate from validity — a will is not invalid because it lacks a notary. But you should never sign one without a self-proving affidavit, which does require a notary alongside the same two witnesses. The affidavit under section 732.503, Florida Statutes lets the will be admitted without tracking down the witnesses years later to testify.

Skipping it saves nothing and hands your family a scavenger hunt at the worst time — and it is the difference between a written last will and testament Fort Lauderdale courts admit on the paperwork alone and one that needs witnesses hunted down. In practice this is the single most common defect I see in wills people prepared themselves, and it is why the Florida will signing requirements deserve an actual ceremony rather than a kitchen table and whoever happens to be home.

Can I write my own will in Florida?

You can, and I would ask you not to. A handwritten will that is signed and witnessed exactly as section 732.502 requires is valid in Florida — the problem is that a handwritten will almost never is. An unwitnessed holographic will is void here regardless of where it was written. Nuncupative wills — oral wills — are not recognized at all.

The deeper problem with a do-it-yourself will or an online will is not the signing ceremony; it is everything the form does not know to ask. It does not know Florida restricts the devise of your homestead. It does not know your spouse has an elective share. It does not know your named personal representative is disqualified as a non-resident. It does not know your retirement account beneficiary form contradicts the document you just signed. Those failures do not produce an error message. They produce a contested case, and the fees in that case dwarf what the plan would have cost. That is why I do not publish fill-in-the-blank forms on this site: the format itself is the hazard.

The honest version of the last will risks Fort Lauderdale clients ask about comes to three. A written last will and testament the witnesses never properly attested. A simple will that quietly conflicts with how the house is titled. And a will naming a personal representative Florida will not appoint.

None of the three announces itself while you are alive. Deciding to write a will and testament Fort Lauderdale courts will honor is the easy part; the work is making the document agree with everything else you own.

Do wills expire in Florida, and are they recorded?

A Florida will does not expire. It remains effective until it is revoked by a later will or codicil, or by a physical act done with the intent to revoke. Nor does a final will and testament Fort Lauderdale residents sign become a Florida will public record during your lifetime — it is not recorded, and it stays a private document that you keep. A divorce has a specific effect: a provision in a will that affects a former spouse is generally void as to that spouse upon dissolution of the marriage under section 732.507(2), Florida Statutes, and a parallel rule in section 732.703 reaches many beneficiary designations. Neither rule is a substitute for actually updating the documents.

What happens if you die without a will in Florida?

The Florida intestacy statutes decide for you. Under sections 732.102 and 732.103, Florida Statutes, your surviving spouse and descendants take in fixed shares that depend on whether all of your descendants are also descendants of that spouse. The result is frequently not what people expect — particularly in blended families, where a surviving spouse and children from a prior relationship split the estate in proportions no one chose. Nothing in the statute accounts for who needed the money, who was estranged, or what you told people you wanted. Having no last will and testament Fort Lauderdale families can rely on is not a neutral choice — it is a choice to let that statute write one for you.

This is also why estate planning for heirs is worth thinking about as its own question rather than a byproduct. Leaving equal shares to people in very unequal circumstances, or leaving an undivided interest in a house to three siblings who do not agree, creates the disputes that fill Florida courtrooms. Estate planning for retirees in particular tends to involve exactly this: one illiquid asset, several beneficiaries and no instructions.

Can I add a no-contest clause to stop someone challenging my will?

Not in Florida, and this surprises people who have read national estate planning advice. A no-contest clause — also called an in terrorem clause, the provision that disinherits anyone who challenges the document — is unenforceable in Florida under section 732.517 for wills and section 736.1108 for trusts.

You can put one in. A Florida court will not enforce it. Most states allow these clauses in some form, which is why so much of what you will read online assumes they work — and why a form drafted for another state can leave you believing you have protection you do not have.

What actually reduces the risk of a challenge is different work: clean execution, a contemporaneous record of capacity where it may be questioned, avoiding the appearance of influence by a beneficiary, explaining an unequal distribution in a separate writing, and in some cases using a funded revocable trust so that a challenger faces a harder procedural path than a will contest. I handle will and trust contests, and the plans that survive them are the ones built with the contest in mind.

The reason “avoiding the appearance of influence” matters so much is the way Florida allocates the burden. Undue influence is presumed where someone who takes a substantial benefit stood in a confidential relationship with the person signing and was active in procuring the document. In re Estate of Carpenter, 253 So. 2d 697, 701–02 (Fla. 1971), lists the conduct that establishes active procurement, and the list is uncomfortably close to what a well-meaning adult child often does: being present at the signing, being present when the parent said they wanted a new will, recommending the attorney, knowing the contents beforehand, giving the attorney instructions, arranging the witnesses, and keeping the document afterward. None of it has to be sinister. Once the presumption attaches, section 733.107(2), Florida Statutes shifts the burden of proof — not merely a burden to offer an explanation — onto the person accused. That is why, when an adult child calls to arrange a parent’s will, my answer is that I will meet the parent alone.

Revocable living trusts

A revocable living trust Florida residents fund properly is the instrument most Broward County clients end up using, and also the one most often misunderstood. You create it, you fund it by retitling assets into it, you serve as your own trustee while you are able, and you name a successor trustee to take over on your incapacity or death.

Setting up a living trust in Florida is therefore two jobs, not one — drafting and funding — and clients who hire a living trust attorney Fort Lauderdale wide for only the first job end up with a document that has no legal effect on anything they own. When people call a trust attorney in Fort Lauderdale a year later because “the trust didn’t work,” this is almost always why.

The living trust Florida requirements come from the Florida Trust Code in chapter 736. Under section 736.0403, Florida Statutes — the revocable trust Florida statute on creation — a trust is validly created if its creation complies with the law of the jurisdiction where the instrument was executed. The revocable trust Florida requirements add one more layer: a revocable trust that disposes of property at death must be executed with the same formalities as a will.

What a revocable living trust does — and does not do

The benefits of a living trust are concrete and worth stating plainly. It lets a successor trustee step in immediately if you become incapacitated, without a court proceeding. It keeps the terms of your plan private rather than filed publicly. It handles out-of-state real estate without a separate administration in that state. And it lets you hold a child’s inheritance until an age you choose rather than handing a lump sum to an eighteen-year-old. A revocable family trust used this way is often the whole reason a client moves past a simple will.

What it does not do: a revocable trust does not shelter your assets from your own creditors while you are alive. You keep the power to revoke it and to reach everything in it, and Florida law treats it accordingly — see section 736.0505, Florida Statutes. Assets in a revocable trust can also remain reachable for the expenses and obligations of your estate under section 736.05053. Anyone selling you a revocable living trust as asset protection is describing a different product.

How to fund a living trust in Florida

Funding is the step that makes the trust real, and it works differently for each asset type. Real estate is funded by preparing and recording a new deed into the trust — the step people most often skip, and the one that decides whether a Broward home avoids a court proceeding. Bank and brokerage accounts are retitled into the trust’s name at the institution, which usually wants a certificate of trust rather than the full document. Life insurance and retirement accounts are generally not retitled at all; you change the beneficiary designation, and naming a trust as the beneficiary of an IRA requires specific drafting to avoid an unwanted tax result. Business interests are assigned, subject to whatever the operating agreement permits.

Setting up a trust in Florida is therefore not finished when you sign. When people ask how much it costs to set up a trust in Florida, the number worth comparing is the one that includes the deed and the retitling, because a quote that covers only the document is quoting half the job.

What is the downside to a living trust in Florida?

Three real ones. It costs more to set up than a will. It requires funding — deeds recorded, accounts retitled, and beneficiary designations coordinated — and an unfunded trust is an expensive folder that accomplishes nothing. And it does not remove your homestead from the constitutional restrictions described above.

An honest account of living trust in Florida pros and cons puts those three limits next to the four benefits and lets you decide. What I will not do is what much of the market does, which is present the trust as the answer to every question. It is excellent at what it does and routinely oversold as a solution to problems it does not touch.

Florida will vs trust: how to choose

The living trust vs will Florida question is the one I am asked more than any other, and the honest answer is that Florida will or trust is rarely an either/or. If you want the difference between a will and a trust in a single sentence: a will speaks only after you die and only through a court, while a trust speaks the moment it is funded and keeps speaking through incapacity and death without one. That is also why a last will and testament trust Fort Lauderdale clients ask me to set up is usually one plan rather than two products, and why a search for a last will trust Fort Lauderdale residents run almost always describes both documents together — most people who use a trust sign a will alongside it, and the two are drafted as a pair. Here is the comparison side by side.

Almost everyone who uses a trust still signs a last will and testament alongside it — a pour-over will that catches anything never retitled and, critically, names guardians. The choice is rarely trust instead of will. It is trust in addition to. If you want the longer treatment of how a Florida trust works on its own, I cover it on my Florida living trust page.

Irrevocable trusts and asset protection

Where genuine creditor exposure exists — a professional practice, rental property, a personal guarantee — the conversation moves to irrevocable structures, where you give up control in exchange for separation between you and the assets. The revocable vs irrevocable trust decision really turns on that single trade: control on one side, separation on the other. You cannot have both.

Two questions come up constantly here, and both have short answers. Does a revocable trust protect assets from creditors? No — you control it, so your creditors can reach it. Does a will protect assets from creditors? No; it does not even operate until you die. Protecting assets from a lawsuit in Florida is done with exemptions, entity structure, insurance, tenancy by the entirety and, where appropriate, irrevocable trusts — not with the documents most people mean when they say estate plan.

Protecting assets for your children is a related but different exercise. Clients ask how to protect assets from a child’s spouse — a daughter in law or son in law they worry about — and the answer is a trust with protective terms rather than an outright gift, because an inheritance left in trust and never commingled is treated very differently in a divorce than money deposited into a joint account. The clause that does that work is the spendthrift provision. Under section 736.0502, Florida Statutes it is valid only if it restrains both voluntary and involuntary transfer of the beneficiary’s interest, and when it does, a creditor cannot reach the interest or a distribution before the beneficiary actually receives it. There are narrow exceptions in section 736.0503 — a child, spouse or former spouse holding a support order, a judgment creditor who provided services protecting the beneficiary’s own interest in the trust, and certain claims of the state or the United States — and even those claimants may attach distributions only as a last resort. Pair it with genuine trustee discretion and the protection is stronger still: section 736.0504 provides that a creditor cannot compel a discretionary distribution or attach a discretionary interest, and that holds even for the exception creditors above. The limit worth being honest about is that none of this protects you — section 736.0505 makes a spendthrift clause ineffective as to the settlor’s own retained interest, which is why a revocable trust offers you no creditor protection at all. Adult children helping to protect aging parents’ assets face the reverse problem and usually need the parents’ documents reviewed first.

Florida is a favorable state for protecting certain categories of property, and it is an unfavorable state for the specific idea of a self-settled trust that you fund, control and benefit from while keeping creditors out. Anyone acting as an irrevocable trust lawyer Fort Lauderdale clients rely on should say that plainly rather than sell a structure the state does not support. Planning of this kind also has to be done well before a claim is on the horizon; done afterward, it is a fraudulent transfer and it makes matters worse.

Long-term care is the other reason irrevocable planning comes up. An irrevocable trust and Florida Medicaid interact through a five-year lookback, which means the technique only helps someone who plans years ahead of the need. If a nursing home admission is already imminent, the honest answer is that different tools apply. A Florida land trust, by contrast, is a titling device used mainly for privacy in real estate holdings and is not an asset protection or Medicaid tool at all, despite how it is often marketed.

Special needs trusts and trusts for particular beneficiaries

A supplemental needs trust lets you provide for a disabled child or grandchild without displacing the means-tested benefits they rely on — an outright inheritance frequently does the opposite of what the giver intended. The same drafting logic supports trusts for a beneficiary with a creditor problem, a substance problem or a divorce on the horizon.

Florida also recognizes a pet trust for the care of an animal, which is a more common request than people assume and one of the few provisions clients bring up unprompted. A trust planning attorney Fort Lauderdale families work with should be comfortable drafting all of these, because the beneficiary who needs protective terms is usually the reason the plan exists.

The durable power of attorney — the document most likely to fail

If I could get every household in Broward County to fix one document, it would be this one. A durable power of attorney in Florida lets someone you choose act for you financially while you are alive and unable to act for yourself. Without one, the alternative is a court guardianship proceeding — slower, public, expensive and supervised, and heard in the probate division of the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit if you live in Broward.

People rarely go looking for a power of attorney lawyer Fort Lauderdale wide until something has already gone wrong: a parent has had a stroke, or a bank has refused a document signed a decade ago in another state. Both situations are fixable far more cheaply before the fact than after.

The 2011 Act, and why “springing” powers no longer work

The Florida durable power of attorney act was rewritten effective October 1, 2011, and it changed how every power of attorney in Florida is drafted. The most consequential change: under section 709.2108, Florida Statutes, an instrument executed on or after that date is not effective on a future contingency such as a determination of incapacity — the springing power that many out-of-state and older documents rely on — with a narrow exception for military service. A Florida durable power of attorney signed today is effective when you sign it.

People find this alarming, and it is the right instinct. It is also the reason the choice of agent matters more than any clause in the document, and the reason the instrument should be prepared and held deliberately rather than handed out casually.

“Superpowers” must be separately signed

Certain authorities — creating or amending a trust, making gifts, changing beneficiary designations, creating survivorship interests, delegating authority, waiving survivor benefits under a retirement plan — are singled out by section 709.2202, Florida Statutes. These powers are not conferred by general language. They must be enumerated in the document and the principal must sign or initial next to each one.

This is why a general durable power of attorney downloaded from anywhere usually fails when it matters. A document that omits the enumerated authorities is not defective for ordinary purposes, but the agent discovers the gap at the moment those powers are needed — typically during a long-term care crisis, when gifting and beneficiary changes are exactly what is on the table.

Scope is a separate decision from durability. A statutory durable power of attorney drafted for full financial authority is the usual choice for incapacity planning, while a limited durable power of attorney granting authority for one transaction — a single closing, one account, a specific vehicle — is often the safer instrument when you are not trying to hand over everything.

Execution requirements and why a bank still says no

The Florida durable power of attorney requirements are set by section 709.2105, Florida Statutes: the principal must sign in the presence of two subscribing witnesses and acknowledge the instrument before a notary.

The Florida durable power of attorney witness requirements are the part clients most often ask about. The practical answer to who can witness a durable power of attorney is anyone competent to do so — but choose people who are not the agent and who have no interest in your affairs. It costs nothing and it removes an argument later.

Even an instrument executed exactly as the durable power of attorney Florida statute demands still gets pushback. Chapter 709 addresses this: a third party may require an affidavit from the agent, and the statute sets out both grounds for refusal and consequences for unreasonable refusal under section 709.2120. Knowing the procedure and having the affidavit ready usually resolves the standoff in days rather than weeks.

Does a durable power of attorney cover medical decisions in Florida?

No. Florida separates them. Financial and legal authority comes from the durable power of attorney under chapter 709. Health care authority comes from a designation of health care surrogate under chapter 765, Florida Statutes. You need both, and clients who assume one document covers everything find out otherwise at a hospital admissions desk.

If the two documents ever conflict, the health care advance directive generally controls — unless the power of attorney was executed later and says expressly that it governs. That is a drafting detail worth getting right rather than discovering in an emergency room.

Two points of vocabulary cause most of the confusion. What other states call a medical power of attorney, Florida calls a designation of health care surrogate — the function is the same, the name is not. And on power of attorney vs durable power of attorney: “durable” simply means the authority survives your incapacity. A non-durable instrument ends exactly when you need it most, which is why almost every planning document is drafted as durable.

Revoking a power of attorney

You can revoke a durable power of attorney at any time while you have capacity. A proper revocation of a durable power of attorney should be in writing, signed, and delivered to the agent and to every institution that has a copy on file — simply tearing up your copy accomplishes very little when a bank still holds one.

Termination is automatic in one circumstance people consistently get wrong. A durable power of attorney Florida after death has no force at all: the agent’s authority ends the moment you die and does not extend to settling your affairs, a point I cover in more depth on my page about whether a power of attorney ends at death.

Health care directives and incapacity planning in Fort Lauderdale

The incapacity half of a Florida estate plan is three documents plus one that most people have never heard of. This is the part of the work an estate planning attorney Ft Lauderdale families call after a hospitalization usually wishes had been done a year earlier.

Incapacity planning Fort Lauderdale clients treat as optional is the half of the plan most likely to be used, because far more people lose capacity for a period than die suddenly. The estate plan directives that cover it are cheap to prepare, quick to sign, and worthless if they do not already exist on the day they are needed.

The designation of health care surrogate names the person who makes medical decisions for you and, if you elect, gives them access to your records immediately rather than only upon incapacity. The living will states your own wishes regarding life-prolonging procedures, so the decision is yours rather than a burden handed to whoever is standing in the hallway — I explain how the two differ on my Florida advance directive page. A HIPAA authorization ensures the people you have named can actually obtain information from providers who are trained to refuse.

The fourth is the pre-need guardian designation. Under section 744.3045, Florida Statutes, you may name in advance the person you want appointed as your guardian if a court ever determines one is necessary, and the person you named is entitled to a statutory presumption. Since guardianship is the outcome an incapacity plan exists to prevent, naming your own choice as a backstop costs nothing and can decide a contested case. Very few Broward County estate plans include a preneed guardian designation. Every one I draft does.

One naming point is worth clearing up, because the terms sound alike and are not. A Florida living will is an end-of-life planning document stating your medical wishes. A living trust is a property instrument. They have nothing to do with each other.

The living trust vs living will confusion sends people to the wrong document constantly. A living will lawyer Fort Lauderdale residents call about end-of-life wishes and a trust attorney are often the same person — but the two documents do entirely unrelated jobs, and having one does not give you the other.

Funeral, burial and final wishes

This is the part of the plan people skip and families need within about six hours of a death. It is also the part where a well-meaning document does the least good if nobody can find it.

Who decides funeral arrangements in Florida?

Florida sets a statutory order of priority for who controls the disposition of remains. Your own written lifetime directions come first, followed by a designation made on military form DD 93 for a service member, then the surviving spouse, then a son or daughter 18 or older, then a parent, then a sibling 18 or older, then a grandchild 18 or older, then a grandparent, and then the next degree of kinship. Where the people at the same level disagree — three adult children who cannot agree on burial or cremation — the dispute lands in front of a judge on an emergency basis, at the worst possible moment.

The fix is to decide it in advance rather than leave it to a tie. Naming the person you want to have that authority, in writing, is a five-minute item that prevents a category of family conflict I have seen more than once.

Should funeral wishes go in a will?

Generally no — or at least, not only there. Putting funeral wishes in a will is the classic timing mistake: the will is often not located or read until days or weeks after the funeral has already happened. Burial instructions written there arrive too late to be followed.

Better is a separate, signed statement of final wishes that the people around you actually have a copy of, covering burial or cremation, the service you want or do not want, and anything specific about disposition of remains. Keep it with the documents your family can reach immediately, and tell them it exists. Organ donation is handled separately again, through your donor registration and driver’s license, and should be mentioned so nobody has to guess under pressure.

Prepaid and preneed funeral contracts

A preneed funeral contract in Florida is a regulated arrangement in which you pay a funeral establishment in advance. Florida requires those funds to be held in trust or backed by insurance, and the contracts are portable and cancellable in defined circumstances. They can be a genuine kindness — the decisions and the money are handled while you are calm rather than by a grieving spouse in a showroom.

Two cautions. Read what happens if you move or if the funeral home changes hands. And know how the contract is treated for Medicaid: an irrevocable preneed contract is generally an exempt asset for eligibility purposes, while a revocable one is generally counted as an available resource. Florida law lets a purchaser who is a Medicaid or SSI applicant or recipient make the contract irrevocable, with any unspent balance remitted to the state after final disposition. That interaction is often the real reason a family is being encouraged to buy one, and it is worth understanding before signing rather than after.

Keeping your family out of court

How to avoid probate in Florida is the question people ask first, and usually the only goal they arrive with. It is achievable, and it is achieved by titling — not by writing “avoid probate” in a document. What assets avoid probate in Florida is therefore the more useful question, because the answer is a list of ownership forms rather than a list of clauses. Assets pass outside the estate when they are held in a funded revocable trust, when they carry a valid beneficiary or payable-on-death designation, when they are held jointly with rights of survivorship, or when Florida real estate is conveyed by an enhanced life estate deed, commonly called a lady bird deed. A last will and testament does the opposite: it is the instrument that requires a court proceeding.

So does a will avoid probate? No — it is the document that sends the estate there. Does a trust avoid probate? For the assets actually titled in it, yes; for everything left outside it, no. That distinction is the entire subject in one line, and it is the reason funding matters more than drafting. Probate avoidance, properly understood, is a titling exercise carried out while you are alive — not a clause someone adds at the end.

Two honest caveats. First, joint titling is the cheapest technique and the most dangerous — it exposes the asset to your co-owner’s creditors and divorce, and it can disinherit people you did not intend to cut out. Second, homestead frequently requires a court order determining its status even where a trust is funded and everything else passes privately — so “will my family have to go through probate in Florida” often has a partial rather than an absolute answer. Anyone promising that a single document eliminates every court filing is overselling. If you are dealing with an estate that is already in administration rather than planning ahead, that is a different subject and I cover it on my Fort Lauderdale probate page.

How Florida property actually passes: titling, deeds and beneficiary designations

Most of what you own will pass by how it is titled, not by what your documents say. This is the part of the plan that gets the least attention and causes the most damage.

Is there a transfer on death deed in Florida?

No. Despite how often people search for a transfer on death deed Florida supposedly recognizes, there is no TOD deed under Florida law. Roughly half the states have one. Florida does not.

What Florida has instead is the enhanced life estate deed, universally called the lady bird deed. It accomplishes the same practical result — the property passes automatically at death without a court proceeding — while you keep full control during life, including the right to sell or mortgage without anyone’s consent. If you came here looking for a TOD deed Florida form, the lady bird deed is the instrument you were actually looking for.

Payable on death and transfer on death accounts

Financial accounts are different from real estate. A payable on death account in Florida works exactly as advertised: you name a beneficiary at the bank, and on your death the funds pass to that person outside of any court process. A POD account Florida banks offer costs nothing to set up and takes about ten minutes.

Brokerage and investment accounts use transfer on death registration to the same effect. Vehicles and boats are the exception — Florida does not offer TOD titling for them, which surprises people who assume every asset can be handled with a beneficiary form.

Tenancy by the entirety in Florida — the protection nobody mentions

This one deserves far more attention than it gets. Florida recognizes tenancy by the entirety, a form of ownership available only to married couples, in which the two spouses hold the property as a single legal unit.

Tenants by the entirety in Florida carries a consequence with real teeth: property held that way is generally not reachable by a creditor of only one spouse. That makes tenancy by the entirety asset protection that requires no trust, no entity and no fee — it is a titling decision. The Florida Supreme Court settled the shape of it in Beal Bank, SSB v. Almand & Associates, 780 So. 2d 45 (Fla. 2001): a conveyance of real property to a husband and wife creates an estate by the entirety unless the deed says otherwise, and because neither spouse owns a divisible share, the property cannot be reached to satisfy the obligation of one spouse alone. Id. at 53–54. Florida is also one of a minority of states that extends the concept beyond real estate to bank accounts, where section 655.79, Florida Statutes supplies the presumption for an account held by spouses.

The limits matter too. It protects against a creditor of one spouse, not a joint creditor. It ends on divorce, converting to a tenancy in common. And it does nothing about a claim both spouses are liable for. Anyone treating it as complete asset protection is overreading it — but leaving it on the table when it is available is a genuine mistake.

Here is how the Florida ownership forms compare:

Two of these — joint tenants vs tenants by the entirety in Florida, and tenants in common versus tenants by the entirety in Florida — are the comparisons married couples most often get wrong on a deed prepared without advice. If you are married and your Broward County home is titled as a joint tenancy in common rather than by the entirety, that is worth a conversation.

Should I add my child to my deed?

Almost always no, and this is the single most expensive piece of do-it-yourself estate planning I see.

Adding a child to a deed in Florida feels like a shortcut — the house passes to them automatically, no court, no lawyer. What it actually does is make an irrevocable gift of a present ownership interest today. From that moment your child’s creditors, a lawsuit against them, a divorce, or a tax lien can reach your home. You also cannot sell or refinance without their signature, and if they later refuse, or become incapacitated, or die first, you have a problem no document fixes cheaply.

Then there is the tax. People searching how to leave my house to my child when I die without paying taxes are usually worried about the wrong tax — Florida has no inheritance tax and most estates owe no federal estate tax. The real cost is income tax on capital gains. Property inherited at death generally receives a stepped-up basis; property gifted during life generally does not. Adding a child to the deed can therefore hand them a much larger capital gains bill when they sell, to avoid a probate proceeding that a lady bird deed or a trust would have avoided anyway, at no tax cost.

The same reasoning applies to adding an adult child to your bank account. It exposes the balance to their creditors and can unintentionally disinherit your other children, because the survivor keeps the account regardless of what your will says.

Beneficiary designation mistakes

Beneficiary forms override your will. That single fact produces more unintended outcomes than any other feature of estate planning, because the forms were filled out years ago and never revisited.

The recurring problems: an ex-spouse still named on a retirement account; a beneficiary who has died with no contingent named; a minor child named directly, which forces a court-supervised guardianship of the property rather than delivering money to a parent; “my estate” named as beneficiary, which pulls an asset into probate that would otherwise have avoided it; and a trust named as beneficiary of a retirement account without the drafting that makes that work.

Deciding who should I name as beneficiary is not a form-filling exercise. It is the step where the documents and the accounts either agree or quietly contradict each other.

What Florida already protects from creditors

Before anyone sells you a structure, it is worth knowing how much protection Florida gives you for free. This state is among the most debtor-protective in the country, and a meaningful part of what people pay for elsewhere is already built into Florida law.

Homestead

The Florida homestead exemption people search for is really two different things, and conflating them causes confusion. The tax exemption reduces your assessed value and is capped at a set amount, which is the homestead exemption amount most people mean. The creditor protection under Article X, section 4 is separate and far more powerful: it is unlimited in value, restricted only by acreage — half an acre inside a municipality, 160 acres outside — and it protects the home from forced sale by most creditors regardless of what the property is worth.

A Fort Lauderdale homeowner with substantial equity is therefore already carrying protection that no trust replicates. The limits are real: it does not defeat a mortgage, a construction lien, or property taxes, and it does not apply to a property that is not your permanent residence.

Wages, retirement accounts and other exempt assets

Beyond the house, Florida exempts several categories outright.

The head of household exemption in Florida protects the wages of a person providing more than half the support of a dependent: disposable earnings of $750 a week or less are entirely exempt from garnishment, and earnings above that cannot be reached without the head of family’s written agreement. For someone who qualifies, that makes wage garnishment in Florida far harder to accomplish than in most states.

Qualified retirement accounts are protected. So is annuity creditor protection in Florida, and life insurance creditor protection extends to the cash surrender value of a policy — both statutory, and both frequently overlooked by people worrying about liability.

College savings are protected too, and this one is worth stating precisely because it is so often described wrongly. Section 222.22(1), Florida Statutes puts the money paid into, the assets of, and the income of a qualified tuition program under section 529 of the Internal Revenue Code — a 529 plan, in the name everyone actually uses, and Florida Prepaid contracts too — beyond the reach of attachment, levy, garnishment or legal process by any creditor of the participant, owner, contributor or beneficiary. There is no dollar cap, no lookback period for recent contributions, and no requirement that the beneficiary be your own child or grandchild. Florida ABLE accounts carry their own separate exemption under section 222.22(5). Tenancy by the entirety covers married couples as described above, and education savings in a qualified tuition program is also among the property a surviving spouse or children may claim as exempt property in an estate.

The practical point for planning: if most of what you own is a homestead, a retirement account, an annuity and life insurance, you may already be substantially protected, and an expensive asset-protection structure may be solving a problem you do not have. That is a conversation worth having before, not after, you buy one.

Exempt property and the family allowance

Two protections operate after death rather than during life, and both benefit the people you leave behind. Florida exempt property gives a surviving spouse or children a claim, ahead of most creditors of the estate, to household furniture, furnishings and appliances in the decedent’s usual residence up to a net value of $20,000, two motor vehicles regularly used by the decedent or the immediate family, all qualified tuition program accounts, and certain public safety benefits. The family allowance provides support to a surviving spouse and dependent lineal heirs during administration, again ahead of general creditors, up to a total of $18,000.

Neither is large in the scheme of a substantial estate, and both matter enormously in a modest one — they are frequently the difference between a family keeping the car and the furniture or not. Both are also worth knowing about when deciding whether an estate needs full administration at all.

Who does what: the roles in a Florida estate plan

Florida uses vocabulary that differs from most other states, and the confusion is not trivial — people name the wrong person to the wrong job because they think two roles are the same.

Personal representative vs executor in Florida

They are the same job under different names. Florida’s probate code says personal representative; most other states, and nearly all popular writing, say executor. If you moved here from New York or New Jersey and your will names an “executor,” the nomination is still effective — Florida simply calls that person a personal representative.

Trustee vs executor — and can one person be both?

A trustee manages assets titled in a trust and answers to the trust document. A personal representative, or executor, administers assets that pass under the will and answers to the court. One deals with private instructions, the other with a public proceeding. The trustee’s job after a death — collecting the assets, paying what has to be paid, accounting to the beneficiaries and distributing what is left — is trust administration, and it is real work even when it never sees a courtroom.

Yes, the same person can be both, and in most plans the same person is. Whether they should be depends on family dynamics more than on law — when the two roles hold different pots of money for different beneficiaries, separating them sometimes prevents a fight.

Beneficiary vs heir

Not interchangeable. A beneficiary is someone you named — in a will, a trust or on an account form. An heir, or heir at law, is someone Florida’s intestacy statutes would give property to if you left no valid will. You can be an heir and receive nothing because a will names someone else. You can be a beneficiary while not being an heir at all. Contests frequently turn on the difference.

Guardianship vs power of attorney in Florida

A power of attorney is something you create voluntarily while you have capacity. Guardianship is something a court imposes after you no longer do. One is a document; the other is a case, with a petition, an examining committee, a judge, an annual accounting and ongoing court supervision.

Two words worth knowing before you need them: a guardian of the person makes decisions about where someone lives and what medical care they receive, while a guardian of the property manages their money and assets. They can be the same person and often are, but they are separate appointments with separate duties — the guardian of the person files an annual guardianship plan, and the guardian of the property files an annual accounting with the court by April 1 under section 744.367, Florida Statutes.

Leaving money to a minor in Florida

This is where the distinction bites, and it is one of the most common planning mistakes I see. A minor cannot take property outright in Florida. Where the amount is modest, a parent acting as natural guardian can collect and manage it without any court involvement — but only up to $15,000 in the aggregate, the limit set by section 744.301(2), Florida Statutes. Above that figure, section 744.387 requires a court-appointed guardian of the property, with the accounting and oversight that follows. And whoever holds it, the child receives the entire balance outright at eighteen.

So naming a young child directly on a life insurance policy or a retirement account does not simply deliver the money to the surviving parent. Past $15,000 it opens a court file, and it hands an eighteen-year-old a lump sum on their birthday. There are two better routes. A custodial account under the Florida Uniform Transfers to Minors Act — a Florida UTMA account, created by naming a custodian in exactly those words under section 710.104 — runs to twenty-one by default and can be written to end at twenty-five, though for an outright gift the child can compel distribution at twenty-one unless the custodian follows a specific notice procedure. A trust does more: it lets you set the ages, the purposes and the trustee, with no court file and no statutory ceiling on how long it lasts. For anything beyond a small sum, the trust is the answer, and the beneficiary form should name it.

How to avoid guardianship in Florida

Preventing guardianship is the entire purpose of the incapacity half of your plan, and it is achievable in most cases with three documents signed while you are well: a durable power of attorney covering finances, a designation of health care surrogate covering medical decisions, and a trust with a named successor trustee if you hold significant assets. Add the pre-need guardian designation as a backstop, so that if a proceeding somehow becomes necessary the person you chose has the statutory presumption rather than whoever files first.

I handle contested guardianship matters in Broward County, which is precisely why I draft the planning documents the way I do. The cases I litigate are, almost without exception, cases where these documents did not exist.

Estate planning for business owners in Broward County

If you own a business, your estate plan and your company’s governing documents have to agree, and frequently they do not. An operating agreement that restricts transfers can override the disposition in your will. A partner’s buy-sell agreement can obligate your estate to sell on terms your family did not negotiate. An LLC interest with no succession provision can leave your spouse holding an unmarketable minority stake in a company she has no role in.

How to align your business structure with your estate plan comes down to reading the two sets of documents against each other before either is finalized, and it is the step most often skipped. Business owner estate planning here covers who takes over operations, who takes the economic interest, how the interest is valued, whether a buy sell agreement is funded with life insurance, and how the interest is held — often in a trust rather than individually. A buy sell agreement that exists but was never funded is one of the more common problems I find. The same logic applies to estate planning for rental property and to professional practices, both common in this market.

Estate planning for real estate held in more than one entity, or for a second home or vacation home outside Florida, needs the deeds and the entity documents reviewed alongside the will and trust. Transferring a house to a trust is straightforward; transferring an LLC interest that owns the house is a different exercise governed by the operating agreement.

Estate planning for physicians, dentists and other licensed professionals adds a further layer, because a practice entity usually cannot pass to a family member who is not licensed. Business owners in Fort Lauderdale, Plantation and Weston are also the clients most likely to have genuine creditor exposure, which is where estate planning and asset protection planning stop being separate conversations. I do a fair amount of estate planning for business owners Wilton Manors is full of, where a dense concentration of owner-operated businesses sits alongside a large community of unmarried and same-sex couples. That combination makes the business succession question and the who-inherits question the same conversation, because Florida intestacy gives an unmarried partner nothing at all — which is why the business owner estate planning attorney Wilton Manors residents want is one who asks about the partnership before asking about the company. This is the work an estate planning lawyer Fort Lauderdale business owners hire should be doing alongside your corporate counsel and your CPA, not in isolation from them.

High-net-worth planning and Florida taxes

What a high net worth estate planning attorney Ft. Lauderdale families hire actually does is less exotic than the phrase suggests. High net worth estate planning strategies here are usually a short list — using the federal exemption before it is needed, keeping life insurance outside the taxable estate, getting basis right on appreciated property, and making sure real estate in several states does not create several administrations. High net worth estate planning Broward County residents need adds one local wrinkle to all of it: homestead, which does not care how large the rest of the estate is.

At the ultra high net worth end the work shifts toward entity structure, valuation and cross-border tax, and that is a point where I will tell you plainly that you want a team rather than one attorney. Below that line — which covers most of the families and business owners on this page — the planning is a matter of care and sequence rather than exotic structures.

Does Florida have an estate tax or an inheritance tax?

No to both. Florida does not impose a state estate tax and does not impose an inheritance tax. Florida’s estate tax was tied to a federal credit that no longer exists, and it does not apply to people who die today — the state’s own Form DR-312, the affidavit of no Florida estate tax due, exists precisely so an estate can record that fact and move on. You may still owe federal estate tax if your taxable estate exceeds the federal exemption, and beneficiaries can face income tax on inherited retirement accounts — but the money your heirs receive is not itself taxed as income to them, and Florida takes nothing. Two affidavits do the paperwork: Form DR-312 where no federal estate tax return is required, and Form DR-313 where one is. Either can be recorded to clear the Florida estate tax lien from title.

The federal numbers, as they stand for 2026: the basic exclusion amount is $15 million per person, raised effective January 1, 2026 by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which also repealed the sunset that was going to cut the figure roughly in half. The generation-skipping transfer tax exemption tracks it at $15 million. The gift tax annual exclusion is $19,000 per recipient per year, or $38,000 from a married couple electing to split gifts — though the split-gift election itself requires filing a gift tax return even when each half falls inside the exclusion. For a spouse who is not a U.S. citizen the annual exclusion is $194,000.

Two traps sit inside those numbers. Portability is not automatic. A surviving spouse inherits the deceased spouse’s unused exclusion only if the executor elects it on a timely filed federal estate tax return — and for an estate that owed no tax and had no filing obligation, a simplified procedure allows that late election up to the fifth anniversary of the death. Miss it and the exclusion is gone. The GST exemption is not portable at all, with no equivalent procedure; a deceased spouse’s unused GST exemption is simply lost. And where the surviving spouse is not a U.S. citizen, the marital deduction is unavailable unless the property passes through a qualified domestic trust, a QDOT — a structure with its own trustee requirements and a deferred estate tax on distributions.

This matters because a great deal of estate planning content aimed at Florida readers — including material published by firms currently ranking for these searches — warns about “estate and inheritance taxes” as though Florida imposed them, and prescribes mandatory credit-shelter trust structures that portability of the federal exemption made unnecessary for the overwhelming majority of married couples. Splitting a married couple’s estate into mandatory trusts they do not need can forfeit a second step-up in basis at the survivor’s death, costing the family real money to solve a tax that was never going to apply. If you were sold that structure years ago, it is worth revisiting.

The Florida community property trust

One Florida option is genuinely underused and worth raising with any married couple holding highly appreciated assets. Since 2021 Florida has permitted a community property trust under sections 736.1501 through 736.1512, Florida Statutes. Property held in a properly formed community property trust can receive a full income tax basis step-up at the first spouse’s death — on both halves — rather than the step-up on one half that ordinary joint ownership or tenancy by the entirety produces.

For a couple holding a long-held Fort Lauderdale property or a concentrated stock position, the difference at a later sale can be substantial. It is not right for everyone: it changes the character of the property, has creditor and divorce implications, and requires deliberate drafting. But it is a real Florida-specific tool, and no page currently ranking for these searches mentions it.

High net worth estate planning in Broward County generally turns on other things entirely: the federal exemption and portability elections, life insurance held outside the taxable estate, closely held business interests and their valuation, real estate in more than one state, non-citizen spouses, and long-horizon structures such as a dynasty trust for children and grandchildren — Florida is unusually hospitable to those, having extended its statutory rule against perpetuities to 1,000 years for trusts created on or after July 1, 2022. If your only question is whether Florida taxes an inheritance, the short answer is on my Florida inheritance tax page.

Leaving money to charity in a will or trust

Charitable giving is the part of a plan people most often intend and least often execute, usually because they assume it requires a foundation. It does not. A charitable bequest is a clause: a fixed sum, a percentage of the residue, or a specific asset, left to a named organization in your will or trust. Naming a charity directly on a retirement account beneficiary form is frequently the more efficient route, because a tax-exempt organization receives those dollars without the income tax a child would owe on the same inheritance. One drafting caution goes with it: give the charity its own account or its own separate beneficiary designation rather than putting it on the same account as your children. A charity is not a “designated beneficiary” for retirement account purposes, and mixing it in with individuals on one account can accelerate the payout schedule for the people you left the rest to.

Name the organization precisely — legal name, city and, ideally, its EIN, because half a dozen similarly named nonprofits operate in Broward County alone. The good news is that Florida law is forgiving if the charity does not survive you: on a merger the gift generally inures to the surviving organization, on a dissolution charitable property cannot simply be diverted, and where a charitable purpose has become impossible or impracticable a court can redirect the gift under the cy pres doctrine in section 736.0413, Florida Statutes. Only where none of that can operate does the gift lapse into the residue. Naming a successor charity anyway costs one sentence and removes the question.

For larger or more structured giving there are vehicles worth discussing at the meeting. A charitable remainder trust pays you or someone you name between 5% and 50% of the trust each year, for life or for a term of up to twenty years, with what remains passing to charity — and the charity’s projected share has to be worth at least 10% of what you put in, which is the constraint that most often decides whether the structure works. A charitable lead trust runs the other way, paying the charity first. A donor advised fund and a private foundation sit at different points on cost and control. Each has real trade-offs, and I explain how they fit into a Florida plan on my charitable bequest page.

Second marriages, blended families and the elective share

Florida gives a surviving spouse a claim against the estate that a will cannot simply write around. The elective share under sections 732.201 through 732.2155, Florida Statutes entitles a surviving spouse to elect an amount equal to thirty percent of the elective estate under section 732.2065 — and the elective estate is defined expansively. It reaches well beyond what passes under the will: revocable trust property, payable-on-death and transfer-on-death accounts, joint accounts, the net cash surrender value of life insurance, and certain retirement benefits are drawn in.

The practical consequence is that the standard blended-family plan — leave the house to the second spouse, leave the investments to the children of the first marriage — can be reopened by an election that pulls in assets the plan assumed were untouchable. Florida also protects a spouse married after a will was executed and a child born after a will was executed, through the pretermitted spouse and pretermitted child provisions in sections 732.301 and 732.302.

Stepchildren are the other half of this problem, and the one people are most surprised by. Section 731.201(3), Florida Statutes defines “child” to expressly exclude a person who is only a stepchild, and Florida intestacy passes property to descendants — so a stepchild you never adopted inherits nothing unless your documents say so by name. Adoption changes it completely: under section 732.108 an adopted person is a descendant of the adopting parent for all inheritance purposes, and section 732.608 carries that into class gifts, so a document leaving property to “my children” reaches an adopted child and not a stepchild. The reverse trap is just as common: leave everything outright to your second spouse and trust them to pass it on to your children later, and the moment they inherit it is theirs to leave to anyone, including their own children or a future spouse. If you want both families provided for, the mechanism is a trust that says so, not an understanding between adults who will not both be alive to honor it.

These rights can be addressed, but through a properly executed marital agreement or spousal waiver — not by drafting around them and hoping. The same is true of homestead: a spouse’s rights in the home are given up by a valid waiver, not by a recital in a will. If you are in a second marriage and your plan has never been reviewed against the elective share, that is the review to schedule.

Widows and widowers are the other group this section is written for. Estate planning for widows almost always starts with a plan that was built for two people and now has to work for one — a surviving spouse frequently holds assets titled jointly, beneficiary forms still naming the deceased spouse, and a trust with a co-trustee who has died. It is a rebuild, not an amendment, and it is one of the most common engagements I take.

Florida inheritance law: who gets what if there is no will

Florida inheritance law is not intuitive, and the single most common assumption about it is wrong. Does a spouse automatically inherit everything in Florida? Only in one specific situation.

Florida intestate succession distributes an estate on a fixed formula that turns on whether all of your descendants are also descendants of your surviving spouse:

Read the third row again, because that is the blended family, and it is the outcome nobody chooses. A surviving second spouse and children from a first marriage split the estate in half — often forcing the sale of a home, and frequently between people who do not get along.

“Per stirpes” simply means a deceased child’s share passes down to that child’s own children rather than being redistributed among the surviving siblings. Florida intestate succession also has a homestead overlay: who inherits homestead property in Florida is governed by the constitutional rules described earlier, not by this table, and the house can descend differently from everything else in the estate.

Florida inheritance law and divorce interact in one useful way — dissolution generally voids provisions in favor of a former spouse — but that is a safety net, not a plan. And none of this reaches assets with a beneficiary designation, which pass to whoever is named on the form regardless of the statute.

Will a nursing home take my house? Medicaid and long-term care

This is among the most anxious questions I am asked, and the honest answer is more encouraging than most people expect — but only if the planning happens early.

A nursing home does not take your house. What actually happens is that long-term care is expensive, Medicaid is the program most people eventually rely on to pay for it, and Medicaid is means-tested. Protecting assets from nursing home costs in Florida means qualifying for that program without impoverishing the family first.

Three mechanics drive everything. The five-year look-back reviews transfers made in the sixty months before application and imposes a penalty period for gifts made inside that window — which is why protecting assets from Medicaid look-back is planning done years ahead, not weeks. Florida is an income cap state, so an applicant over the income limit typically uses a qualified income trust, sometimes called a Miller trust, to qualify. Florida’s 2026 monthly income cap is $2,901, which is 300% of the federal SSI benefit rate. And Medicaid estate recovery allows the state to seek reimbursement from the probate estate for benefits paid after age 55 — though Florida’s homestead protections significantly limit what recovery can reach, which is one of the more favorable features of planning here.

What this means practically: a revocable trust does nothing for Medicaid eligibility, because you still control the assets. Protecting assets from Medicaid with a trust requires an irrevocable structure, executed well before the five-year window. Assisted living is generally paid differently from skilled nursing care, and the two are frequently conflated in the same conversation. If a placement is already imminent, different and more limited tools apply — but “it is too late to do anything” is rarely true, and it is worth asking before assuming.

Can someone with dementia still sign a will in Florida?

Often yes — and the answer surprises families on both sides of the question.

Testamentary capacity is judged at the moment of signing, not by a diagnosis. Florida’s standard, restated by the Fourth District as recently as this year in Frank v. Conlan, 434 So. 3d 452, 462 (Fla. 4th DCA 2026), asks whether the person was able to understand in a general way the nature and extent of their property, the natural objects of their bounty, and the practical effect of the document as executed. The capacity to create, amend or revoke a revocable trust is the same standard, set by section 736.0601, Florida Statutes. A person with early or moderate dementia can meet that standard on a good day, and a person with no diagnosis at all can fail it.

Estate planning for a parent with dementia is therefore a question of timing and evidence rather than a closed door. Where capacity may later be questioned, the signing should be documented carefully — a contemporaneous physician’s assessment, disinterested witnesses, and a record of the meeting. Estate planning for a spouse with dementia raises the additional problem that the healthy spouse’s own documents usually need rewriting at the same time, because they probably name the person who can no longer serve.

What cannot be done: a power of attorney signed by someone who has already lost capacity is void, and no lawyer can fix that after the fact. At that point guardianship is the only remaining route. Making a will with Alzheimer’s or dementia is a conversation to have this month, not next year.

Digital assets and cryptocurrency

Florida adopted a fiduciary access statute in chapter 740, Florida Statutes, which governs whether the person handling your affairs can reach your email, cloud storage, photographs, domain names, loyalty balances and exchange accounts. The hierarchy matters: where a provider offers an online tool that lets you designate what happens to the account, a designation made through that tool generally controls over anything your will or trust says. Most people have never used one.

Self-custodied cryptocurrency is a separate and harder problem, because no statute recovers a seed phrase nobody can find. The planning answer is a documented inventory and a secure access mechanism that does not put keys in a document that becomes a public record. Chapter 740 authority language belongs in the will, the trust and the power of attorney — three documents, not one — and it is missing from nearly every plan I review.

What happens to your assets in Florida, asset by asset

People rarely ask about their estate as a whole. They ask what happens to my house when I die, or who gets my bank account, or what happens to my 401(k) if I die before I retire. Here is the Florida answer for each, in one place.

The last row deserves emphasis because it causes real fear. What happens to my credit card debt when I die, or my medical debt, or my student loan debt, is that the personal representative pays valid claims from estate assets in the statutory order set by section 733.707, Florida Statutes, and unpaid balances generally die with the estate. Your children do not personally inherit your debts merely by being your children. Florida once had a common-law “necessaries” doctrine that made a husband liable for his wife’s medical bills; the Florida Supreme Court abolished it outright in 1995 rather than extend it to both spouses, so it is not a route to a surviving spouse either. What does create liability is separate: a co-signer or joint account holder remains liable on their own obligation, a beneficiary who received a distribution from an insolvent estate can be required to give it back up to the value received, and some federal student loans are discharged at death while private loans may not be. I cover the subject in depth on my page about what happens to your debt when you die.

Boats, condos and waterfront property: the Fort Lauderdale specifics

Two asset types dominate this market and are handled badly almost everywhere.

What happens to my boat when I die?

Fort Lauderdale is the yachting capital of the world, and vessel ownership is one of the clearest gaps in the average estate plan. Florida offers no transfer on death titling for a vessel. A boat therefore does not pass by beneficiary designation the way a brokerage account does — it sits in your individual name and lands in the estate, with dockage, insurance and maintenance accruing while everyone waits.

The workable answers are ownership in a trust, ownership through an entity where the entity interest is planned for, or joint titling where that is appropriate. For anyone in the marine industry, or with a vessel of real value at a Broward marina, this is worth ten minutes of the first meeting.

Inheriting a condominium in Florida

Broward is condominium country, and a unit is the least simple asset on this page to inherit. Three things make it different, and the first one surprises almost everyone.

An heir inherits the unpaid assessments along with the unit. Under section 718.116(1)(a), Florida Statutes, a unit owner is liable for every assessment coming due while they own it and is jointly and severally liable with the previous owner for unpaid assessments that came due before the transfer — and the statute makes no exception for a unit that arrives by will, by intestacy or by distribution from an estate. The amount owed is payable to the association within thirty days of the transfer of title. The heir does have a right of contribution back against the estate, but the association can look to them first. Assessments accruing during administration, meanwhile, belong to the estate as owner, and the association can record a claim of lien and foreclose while the probate is still open.

The bills got bigger. Milestone inspections under section 553.899 reach residential condominium buildings three habitable stories or higher at thirty years from the certificate of occupancy — twenty-five where a local enforcement agency lowers the trigger, which coastal jurisdictions may do — and repeat every ten years. Structural integrity reserve studies under section 718.112(2)(g) apply to those same buildings and must cover the roof, structure, fireproofing, plumbing, electrical, waterproofing and exterior painting, windows and exterior doors. The change that matters most for planning: for budgets adopted on or after 31 December 2024, associations can no longer simply vote to waive or underfund the reserves for those items. That is why an inherited unit can now arrive carrying a special assessment large enough to change whether the family wants it at all.

Transfer restrictions are real but limited, and the limits are worth knowing before anyone assumes the worst. A declaration may govern transfer under section 718.104(5), but an association can require approval of a title transfer only if the declaration actually says so in those terms — a clause covering leases and occupancy does not reach a change of ownership. A provision letting the association refuse consent arbitrarily, with no matching obligation to buy the unit or produce a buyer at fair market value within a reasonable time, is an unreasonable restraint on alienation and unenforceable. And many declarations exempt transfers to family members outright, subject only to notice. Rights of first refusal are enforceable if reasonable in scope and duration.

One reassurance. A condominium unit that was the decedent’s homestead gets the full protection of Article X, section 4 — there is no condominium carve-out. General creditors cannot reach it, and it inures to the surviving spouse or heirs. The exception is the association’s own assessment lien, which falls within the constitutional exception for “taxes and assessments thereon” and survives against homestead. The devise restrictions apply in full too, so a condominium cannot be left past a surviving spouse or minor child any more than a house can.

Planning for a condominium therefore means reading the declaration before deciding how to title the unit, being honest with heirs about assessments they may inherit rather than merely encounter, and — where the association’s finances are shaky — asking whether the unit should be sold during administration rather than distributed. A unit left equally to three children who cannot agree on selling is the beginning of a partition case, not a gift.

Who I work with

Estate planning is triggered by circumstances more than by age. These are the situations that most often bring people to a first meeting.

Life events. Estate planning after divorce, where the old documents still name a former spouse. Estate planning before marriage or after marriage, where two sets of assets and sometimes two sets of children are being combined. Newlyweds writing a first plan, and new parents whose only real question is who raises the children. Estate planning for retirement, where the plan shifts from accumulating to distributing. If you are wondering at what age you should do estate planning, the honest answer is whenever you have a child, a house or someone who depends on you — not a birthday.

Household shape. Estate planning for a single person, for single parents, and for couples without children, where Florida intestacy sends assets to relatives you may barely know.

Estate planning for unmarried couples and unmarried partners deserves its own mention, because under Florida law an unmarried partner inherits nothing without documents. That matters a great deal in Wilton Manors and across Broward’s LGBTQ community, where estate planning for same sex couples and long-term partners is frequently the difference between a home kept and a home lost.

Adult children planning alongside aging parents are a third group — often the ones who call first. And estate planning for widows means rebuilding a plan that was written for two people and now has to work for one.

Medical professionals. Estate planning for physicians, dentists and nurses carries licensure and liability considerations a general plan does not address, and a practice entity usually cannot pass to an unlicensed family member.

Public service. Law enforcement officers, firefighters and first responders have pension and survivor-benefit elections that interact with the plan. Teachers face the same with FRS elections. Veterans and military retirees have survivor benefits and VA considerations sitting alongside the ordinary documents — and this is an underserved group in Broward, which has a large veteran population.

Property and business. Landlords, real estate investors and small business owners all share one problem: entity documents that have to agree with estate documents, and usually do not.

Across borders. Broward and Miami-Dade are full of families whose assets are not all in one country. I work with Canadian owners of Florida property, dual citizens, expats, foreign nationals and immigrant families, and with couples where one spouse is a non-citizen — a situation with its own rules that a standard plan does not address.

Comparing Fort Lauderdale estate planning attorneys

If you are comparing Fort Lauderdale estate planning attorneys before you call anyone, that is the right instinct — this is a relationship you will keep for decades, and the documents only matter if they are right. Most people shortlisting Fort Lauderdale estate planning lawyers look first at how long a firm has been around and how many names are on the door. Those are the two things that tell you the least.

Directory rankings tell you even less. The listings that dominate searches for the best estate planning attorney Fort Lauderdale has, or for a top estate planning attorney anywhere, are advertising placements and peer-nomination badges rather than assessments of anyone’s work. The same is true of any ranked list of lawyers specializing in estate planning — those positions are bought, not earned. Membership in a group such as the Broward County Estate Planning Council says something about engagement with the field; a paid directory tier says nothing at all.

Estate attorney, estate lawyer, estate planner — do the titles mean anything?

Not much, and one of them is a warning.

Someone advertising as an estate attorney Fort Lauderdale wide, and someone advertising as an estate lawyer Fort Lauderdale wide, are describing the same work. So is the practice listed as a trust and estate attorney Fort Lauderdale clients found through a directory. No Florida licensing distinction sits behind any of these labels.

The same goes for the service names. Wills and trusts Fort Lauderdale wide, estate planning wills Fort Lauderdale, and plain “estate planning” are, in nearly every case, the identical engagement described three ways.

A few of the labels do hint at emphasis. A practice that markets itself as a trust and estate planning lawyer Fort Lauderdale clients hire for trust work is usually signalling that trusts are the bulk of what it does, and a wills and trusts attorney Fort Lauderdale wide is signalling document drafting rather than litigation. A will and trust attorney and an elder law attorney are drawing the same distinction from opposite ends — the first emphasizes the documents, the second emphasizes long-term care, Medicaid and capacity as people age. Those are useful hints. They are not credentials.

The trust side of the vocabulary is the most crowded of all, and none of it is regulated. A trust planning attorney, a trust law attorney, a trust estate planning attorney, a living trust lawyer, an irrevocable trust attorney and a wills trusts and estates lawyer are, in ordinary practice, describing the same qualification.

So are the firm-style labels — trust and will attorneys, lawyers for trusts and wills, a trusts and estates attorney, a trust and estate planning law office Fort Lauderdale directories list under four different headings.

Trust planning lawyers and the trust planning lawyer a friend recommended are the same qualification described twice. When people look for attorneys that do living trusts, or for a Fort Lauderdale wills and trusts practice, they are describing the work rather than a specialty the Bar recognizes.

Two of these labels do carry information. Someone who calls themselves a trust administration attorney is signalling post-death work — collecting assets, accounting to beneficiaries, distributing — which is a different job from drafting the trust in the first place. And a practice that describes itself as handling both planning and litigation is telling you it has seen its own documents tested. Ask which of the two any particular firm actually does most.

The exception matters. An “estate planner” is not necessarily a lawyer at all. Search estate planner Fort Lauderdale and you will find financial advisors, insurance agents and document preparation services alongside attorneys. Some do excellent work within their fields. None of them can give you legal advice about the homestead restriction, the elective share or whether your named personal representative is eligible to serve, and a document preparer who drafts your trust is practicing law without a license.

Ask one question and the ambiguity disappears: are you a member of The Florida Bar, and what is your bar number? Mine is 107002.

None of this means the label is meaningless to you as a searcher. If you know you want a trust, searching for an estate planning trust attorney Fort Lauderdale wide is a perfectly sensible way to find one. Just do not treat the phrase on the website as evidence of anything.

What to ask before you hire anyone

Whether you end up here or somewhere else, these questions separate the practices that will serve you well from the ones that will hand you a template:

• Who actually drafts the documents? At many estate planning law firms the person you meet is not the person who writes your trust. Ask directly.
• How many people will handle my file, and how much time do I get with the attorney? The more lawyers a practice has, the more of your matter is delegated. That is not a criticism of firms — it is how they are built — but it is the difference you will feel most.
• Who will I call in three years? Plans need amendments. If the attorney who knows your family leaves, what happens to your file?
• Will you review my beneficiary designations and my deed, or only draft documents? Drafting without funding is half a job, and it is the half that fails. Worth asking of any of the trust planning lawyers Fort Lauderdale directories put in front of you.
• Is the fee flat, and quoted before the work starts? A number given after the fact is not a quote.
• What is your answer on homestead? If a Florida attorney does not raise Article X, section 4 in the first meeting when you own a home, keep looking.
• Do you do this work every week? An estate planning law firm Fort Lauderdale wide may be devoted to this work or may be a general practice that drafts a will when a client asks. Both exist; only one keeps current on chapter 732 and chapter 736.
• Are you licensed in Florida, and is this a real office? Several practices ranking for these searches operate offices in dozens of states from a single template. Ask where the attorney is admitted.

How a solo practice compares to firms with more lawyers

Here is the difference between this practice and most Fort Lauderdale estate planning firms, stated plainly: you get substantially more one-on-one time with your actual attorney here than you will at a firm with more lawyers. That is not a claim about talent. It is arithmetic about how the two structures work.

At a multi-lawyer firm your matter is normally split. A partner takes the initial meeting and sets the strategy, an associate drafts, a paralegal assembles the signing packet and handles the funding, and a different attorney covers the signing if your partner is in a hearing that morning. Each handoff is a point where something you said in the first meeting does not survive to the document, and each one is a conversation you end up having twice. It is an efficient way to run a firm. It is not the same as sitting with one lawyer who knows your family.

I am one attorney. There are no associates and no rotating file assignments. You get the same lawyer at every stage — the attorney who takes your first call is the attorney who maps your assets, drafts your trust, catches the beneficiary designation that contradicts it, sits with you and your witnesses at the signing, and answers the phone in four years when your daughter gets married and you want to change something. You explain your family once. You get the drafting attorney’s own attention at every meeting rather than a share of it. And when you call, you reach the person who wrote the document — not an assistant who has to pull the file and find out.

To be fair about the trade-off: larger firms offer bench depth, specialists down the hall and coverage when someone is away, and for a nine-figure estate with an international tax structure that depth is genuinely worth having. But for the families, retirees and business owners who make up most of this market, direct access to one experienced attorney is worth more than headcount — and direct access is exactly what a solo practice is built to deliver.

The other practical difference is scope. Many of the attorneys specializing in estate planning in this market do only planning, and refer the matter out when something goes wrong later. I also handle Florida estate litigation, homestead determinations, undue influence and capacity claims, and will contests, which means the documents I write are written by someone who has watched documents get tested in court and knows which clauses are the ones that get fought over. When you compare estate planning attorneys Fort Lauderdale directories put in front of you, that is a difference worth asking about directly. When attorneys that do living trusts Fort Lauderdale wide have never had to defend one, the drafting shows it.

So if you are weighing an estate planning lawyer Fort Lauderdale friends recommended against a larger practice, ask the comparison question directly: how many people will touch my file, and how much time will I actually spend with the attorney who writes my documents? At most estate planning law firms the honest answer is several people and a fraction of one attorney’s attention. Here it is one person and all of it.

What does estate planning cost in Fort Lauderdale?

Almost no law firm will talk about this openly, which I have never understood. Here is how I handle it.

I do not quote a price before I understand your situation, because a number given that early is a guess dressed up as a quote. What I do instead is sit down with you and go through it in detail — what you own, how each piece is titled, who is in your family, what you are actually worried about — and then work with you to arrive at a flat fee for the whole engagement, agreed before any drafting begins.

Where a flat fee is not the right fit, I will tell you so and we will find a fee arrangement that works for your circumstances. I would rather structure something you can plan around than lose you over a number neither of us discussed. That conversation is part of the first meeting — a free consultation, in the plainest sense of the phrase — and you are under no obligation at the end of it.

The cost of estate planning is the question almost every caller has and almost no firm answers publicly. The honest reason is that a Florida will cost and a living trust cost in Florida genuinely have different answers for a single person with one bank account than for a couple with three properties and a business. Any living trust Florida cost quoted before anyone has asked how your property is titled is not really a quote — it is a marketing number that will be revised later.

What moves the figure is complexity, not length: a blended family, a business interest, out-of-state or foreign property, a beneficiary who needs protective terms, or an estate large enough for tax planning all take more work than a straightforward plan. I bill hourly only for work that genuinely cannot be scoped in advance, and I say so at the outset rather than converting a flat quote into an hourly engagement partway through.

Affordable estate planning, meanwhile, is not the cheapest document you can find. It is the document that does not have to be litigated afterward.

One item deserves a note of its own. A durable power of attorney Florida cost is small — the least expensive thing on the list below — and it is consistently the document clients skip. It is also the one most likely to be needed while you are still alive.

These are the engagements I am most often asked about:

Call and we will work out where you fit and what it costs, before you commit to anything.

For comparison, the cost of a contested case after a plan fails is measured in tens of thousands of dollars and years of a family not speaking to each other. Every DIY-will disaster I have handled would have been prevented by a fee smaller than the first month of the litigation it caused.

How long does it take?

From the first meeting to the signing ceremony, most plans take two to four weeks. The first meeting is where we map what you own, how it is titled, and who you want to handle what. I draft, you review, we revise, and then we sign — properly witnessed and notarized, which is the step people most often get wrong on their own.

Signing remotely: electronic wills and online notarization — and yes, I offer it

Florida is one of a small number of states that authorizes a fully electronic will, and it permits remote online notarization. That combination means a complete Florida estate plan can be prepared, witnessed, notarized and executed without anyone driving to an office.

I offer remote signing, and I have since the law made it workable. It is not a workaround or a lesser version of the process — for clients who are out of state, travelling, homebound, recovering from surgery, or simply working through a weekday they cannot give up, a virtual signing produces documents every bit as valid as one done across my conference table.

How it actually works

A Florida online notary appears with you by audio-video, verifies your identity through a credential check, and notarizes electronically. The witnesses appear on the same session. The signed instrument is stored as an electronic record with a qualified custodian rather than as a piece of paper in a drawer. An electronic will in Florida executed this way is a valid will — the statute is explicit about it, and it is not an experiment.

Remote execution also carries safeguards that a kitchen-table signing does not: the session is recorded, identity is verified rather than assumed, and the process includes screening questions designed to detect whether the person signing is being pressured. For a plan that might later be challenged, that record can be an advantage rather than a compromise.

The two limits you will not read anywhere else

Remote signing is not unlimited, and both restrictions catch people who assume it is.

A remotely witnessed power of attorney cannot grant the “superpowers.” Under section 709.2202(6), Florida Statutes, a power of attorney signed by a Florida resident whose witnesses were not physically present with the principal is ineffective to grant the seven enumerated authorities — creating a trust, amending or revoking one, making gifts, creating or changing survivorship rights, changing beneficiary designations, waiving a joint and survivor annuity or retirement survivor benefit, and disclaiming property. Those are precisely the powers an agent needs in a long-term care crisis. If your power of attorney needs them, the witnesses must be in the room.

Screening answers can disqualify remote witnessing entirely. Under section 117.285(5), Florida Statutes, when fewer than two witnesses are physically present the notary must ask the principal whether they are under the influence of a drug or alcohol impairing decision-making, whether a physical or mental condition or long-term disability impairs their normal daily activities, and whether they require assistance with daily care. If the answer to any of the three is yes, the document can only be validly witnessed by people physically present. A vulnerable adult, as Florida defines the term, cannot have these documents witnessed remotely at all.

When I still recommend signing in person

Not every document, and not every client. Where capacity may later be questioned, where a family member has been applying pressure, or where the plan is complex enough that I want to watch someone read it, I will tell you plainly that we should sit down together. I have offices in Fort Lauderdale and Coral Gables and I would rather use them when the situation calls for it.

The honest position is that remote signing is a genuine option, not a default and not a gimmick — and knowing which situations call for which is part of what you are hiring. I go through the whole question, including what can and cannot be executed remotely under Florida law, on my Florida online estate planning page. If the document you need is a power of attorney, my page on the Florida power of attorney covers its own execution requirements, and Spanish-speaking clients can read about the carta poder en Florida.

Broward County estate planning attorney: the cities I serve

My Fort Lauderdale office is at 12 SE 7th Street, Suite 701, downtown near Las Olas. Whether you found me as a Fort Lauderdale will attorney or as a Fort Lauderdale trust attorney, it is the same office and the same attorney.

Working with a Broward County estate planning attorney rather than a statewide document service matters more than it sounds: homestead exemption records sit with the Broward County Property Appraiser, deeds are recorded through the county’s Records, Taxes and Treasury Division, and any guardianship proceeding your plan is designed to avoid would be heard in the probate division of the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit here in Fort Lauderdale.

The estate planning Broward County families need is also shaped by what people here own — waterfront homes, condominiums, boats, rental property and closely held businesses, often alongside real estate in another state or another country. Those facts change the plan. Guardianship petitions, incidentally, are heard in the 17th Judicial Circuit’s probate division, which is why the incapacity documents matter as much as the will.

I work with clients throughout the county: Wilton Manors, Oakland Park, Plantation, Davie, Weston, Sunrise, Pembroke Pines, Miramar, Hollywood, Coral Springs, Parkland, Pompano Beach, Deerfield Beach, Coconut Creek, Tamarac, Lauderhill, Margate, Cooper City, Dania Beach, Hallandale Beach and Lighthouse Point. The smaller municipalities count too, and are often the ones a statewide service has never heard of — Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Sea Ranch Lakes, Hillsboro Beach, North Lauderdale, Southwest Ranches, Pembroke Park, West Park and Lazy Lake. From my Coral Gables office I serve Miami-Dade, including Miami, Aventura, Hialeah, Doral, Key Biscayne and Coral Gables itself, and I handle Palm Beach County matters in Boca Raton, Delray Beach, Boynton Beach, West Palm Beach and Jupiter.

Within Fort Lauderdale itself, the neighborhood usually tells me something about the plan before we open a single document. Las Olas and Colee Hammock bring condominium and townhouse titling questions. Rio Vista, Harbor Beach and Bay Colony bring waterfront homestead, dockage and vessel titling. Victoria Park and Sailboat Bend bring long-held homes with a Save Our Homes differential worth protecting. Coral Ridge, Imperial Point and Poinsettia Heights bring families thinking about a second marriage, adult children or a parent who is starting to need help. The law does not change from one to the next. What is at stake in the paperwork does.

If you are searching for a Broward County estate planning lawyer, the practical question is not proximity. It is whether the attorney works with Florida homestead, Florida spousal rights and the local recording and exemption offices regularly. Broward estate planning is not the same work as estate planning in Ohio with the county name changed.

That is also the test to apply to an estate planning attorney Broward County residents found through a directory, and the reason I would rather you ask me about homestead in the first ten minutes than about how long I have been practicing.

Anyone comparing a South Florida estate planning attorney across the tri-county area should know the differences are real but narrower than they look. Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach share Florida law; what changes is the property mix and the family structures. Estate planning South Florida clients need is rarely a template, but it is rarely three different bodies of law either.

Signing does not always require a trip downtown. Florida permits remote online notarization and electronic wills under specific conditions, and I explain what can and cannot be executed that way on my Florida online estate planning page. Some documents are better signed in person, and I will tell you plainly which ones.

Planificación patrimonial en español

Hablo español y atiendo a clientes hispanohablantes en Fort Lauderdale, Broward y Miami-Dade. Como abogado de planificación patrimonial, preparo testamentos, fideicomisos revocables, poderes notariales duraderos y directivas anticipadas de salud conforme a la ley de Florida, y explico cada documento en su idioma antes de firmarlo.

Si usted se mudó a Florida desde otro país o desde otro estado, la revisión de sus documentos existentes es el primer paso — un poder notarial firmado fuera de Florida con frecuencia no es aceptado por los bancos aquí, y un testamento redactado en otro estado puede nombrar a un representante personal que Florida no puede designar. Una directiva anticipada de salud y la designación de un sustituto para decisiones médicas son documentos separados y usted necesita ambos.

¿Fideicomiso o testamento? Es la pregunta más frecuente y la respuesta rara vez es una u otra. El testamento nombra al tutor de sus hijos menores; el fideicomiso en vida evita el proceso judicial para los bienes que estén a su nombre y funciona también si usted queda incapacitado. Fideicomiso y testamento no son lo mismo, y la mayoría de los planes incluyen ambos.

Como abogado de herencias y testamentos, ofrezco consulta gratuita inicial. Puede leer más sobre el testamento en Florida y sobre la carta poder en Florida, o llamarme directamente al (305) 224-6811. Le atiendo yo mismo, no un asistente.

How the process works

1. The first conversation. An estate planning consultation covering what you own, how it is titled, who is in your family, and what you are actually worried about. No charge, and no obligation — and if the estate planning advice at the end is that you need less than you thought, that is what you will hear.
2. The plan. I tell you which documents you need and which you do not, and I quote a flat fee before any drafting begins.
3. Drafting. I write the documents myself. You get them to read, with the reasoning explained in plain language.
4. Revisions. We change what needs changing. This is normal and expected.
5. Signing. Executed with the witnesses and notary Florida requires, in the order Florida requires.
6. Funding and follow-through. Deeds recorded, accounts retitled, beneficiary designations corrected. A plan that stops at the signing is only half done.

Working together: what to bring and what to ask

Questions to ask an estate planning attorney

Use these on me and on anyone else you speak with. The best questions to ask an estate planning attorney are the ones with checkable answers: What is your Florida Bar number? Who drafts the documents? Who handles funding after signing? Is the fee flat and quoted in advance? What happens to my file if you retire? How does Florida homestead affect my house? Have you handled a contested matter, or only drafting?

Questions to ask when hiring an estate planning attorney should also include the uncomfortable one about scope — whether the engagement ends at signature or includes retitling the accounts and recording the deed. That single answer separates a document package from a plan.

What to bring to your first estate planning meeting

Preparing for an estate planning meeting takes an hour and saves several. Bring, or simply be ready to describe: a list of what you own and roughly what it is worth; how each item is titled; deeds for any real estate; recent statements showing the beneficiary named on retirement accounts and life insurance; any existing will, trust or power of attorney, including out-of-state ones; business entity documents; a marital agreement if you have one; and the names, ages and rough addresses of the people you want to receive or administer things.

You do not need any of it perfectly organized. What to bring to an estate planning appointment is less important than being ready to say who you trust and what worries you.

The basic estate planning documents, and which need to be notarized

An estate planning documents checklist for Florida runs: last will and testament; revocable living trust if you are using one; durable power of attorney; designation of health care surrogate; living will; HIPAA authorization; deeds; and beneficiary designation forms. Those are the basic estate planning documents — everything else is a variation.

Which estate planning documents need to be notarized? The power of attorney must be notarized and witnessed by two people. The will needs two witnesses, and should carry a notarized self-proving affidavit even though the notary is not what makes it valid. A revocable trust disposing of property at death follows will formalities. The health care surrogate designation and living will have their own witness rules. This is exactly why a signing ceremony matters.

Where to keep your estate planning documents

Keep the signed original will somewhere findable and tell the people who will need it. A common and avoidable disaster is an original locked in a safe deposit box that nobody can open without a court order. A fireproof box at home, your attorney’s file, or a bank arrangement your personal representative can actually access all work — secrecy is not the goal, findability is.

Give copies of the power of attorney and health care surrogate to the people named in them. A document nobody can produce at a hospital is functionally the same as no document.

The letter of instruction

This is not a legal document and it is the one families thank you for most. An estate planning letter of instruction sits alongside the legal papers and says where things are, who to call, what accounts exist, what the passwords arrangement is, which items have meaning to whom, and what you want for a funeral. It has no legal force, so it cannot conflict with the will — it simply spares your family from reconstructing your life from paperwork while grieving.

Already have a plan? Updating and reviewing it

Roughly half the people who call me already have documents. That work is usually cheaper and faster than starting over.

When you update my will is the search, the answer is normally one of two instruments. A codicil amends a will and must be executed with the same formalities as the will itself — which is why, for anything beyond a trivial change, I generally recommend a new will instead. Handwriting a change on the signed original does not work and can jeopardize the entire document.

To change a will executor — to name a different personal representative — the same rule applies: it takes a properly executed amendment or a new will, not a note. Amending a trust in Florida is usually simpler, because most revocable trusts contain their own amendment procedure; a restatement replaces the whole document while keeping the original trust, and its funding, intact. That is often the cleanest way to modernize an old plan without re-deeding property.

An estate plan review is worth doing every three to five years and immediately after any of the triggers described above. Most reviews end with a short amendment or with nothing at all — and being told nothing needs changing is a legitimate outcome I am happy to deliver.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a lawyer for estate planning in Florida?

Not legally. But Florida’s homestead restrictions, elective share, personal representative eligibility rules and power of attorney formalities are exactly the issues a form cannot detect, and each one is capable of undoing an otherwise sensible plan. If your situation is a single person with no real estate and no children, the risk is low. If you own a home, have been married more than once, own a business, or moved here from another state, the risk is not low.

Do I need a will or a trust, or both?

Usually both. The will names guardians for your children and catches anything that never made it into the trust; the trust handles incapacity, privacy and out-of-state property. How do I know if I need a will or a trust is really a question about four things: whether you own real estate in more than one state, whether anyone should not receive a lump sum, whether you want your affairs private, and who would manage your assets if you could not. If none of those apply, a will and good beneficiary designations may genuinely be enough.

Is a revocable living trust worth it?

It is worth it when it does something a will cannot — manage incapacity without a court, avoid a second proceeding for out-of-state property, keep terms private, or hold a beneficiary’s share. It is not worth it if you buy one and never fund it, which is the most common way the money gets wasted. Ask what it will do in your specific situation before agreeing to one.

Is estate planning worth it, and is it necessary?

Is estate planning necessary in the sense of legally required? No. Is it worth it? Compare a few thousand dollars now against a guardianship proceeding, a contested will, or a house that cannot be sold because title is stuck. Everyone gets an estate plan eventually — the only question is whether you write it or the Florida Legislature does.

At what age should you do estate planning?

There is no age. The triggers are events: a child, a house, a marriage, a business, a diagnosis, a move to Florida. A single 28-year-old with a condo and a retirement account needs a beneficiary review and a power of attorney far more urgently than a 70-year-old with everything already in a funded trust. When should you make a will? Once anyone would be affected by your not having one.

Do I need a lawyer to write a will in Florida?

No, and that is exactly the problem. Can I make my own will without an attorney? Legally yes. Should you? Florida’s execution formalities are unforgiving, and the substantive traps — homestead, the elective share, an ineligible personal representative, beneficiary forms that contradict the document — are invisible to a form. Making a will without a lawyer in Florida usually works right up until the moment it matters.

Are estate planners worth it?

Judge it against what failure costs. A plan is a few thousand dollars. A contested case over an ambiguous will, a rejected power of attorney or a homestead nobody could transfer runs into five figures quickly and takes years. The value is not the paper — it is that the paper works when it is used, at a moment when no one is available to explain what you meant.

What five documents do you need for estate planning?

A will, a durable power of attorney, a designation of health care surrogate, a living will and a HIPAA authorization. Many Florida families add a sixth — a revocable living trust — and a seventh that almost no one includes, the preneed guardian designation.

Is it better to have a will or a trust in Florida?

It depends on whether you care most about cost or about control and privacy. A will is cheaper and names guardians for your children. A trust costs more, requires funding, and in exchange keeps your affairs private, handles incapacity without a court, manages out-of-state real estate, and lets you control the timing of what your beneficiaries receive. Most people who use a trust sign a will alongside it.

Who needs a trust rather than just a will in Florida?

People with real estate in more than one state, people with minor children or beneficiaries who should not receive a lump sum, people who want their affairs kept private, blended families, business owners, and anyone whose incapacity would leave no one able to manage assets without a court order.

Is it wise to put your house in a living trust?

Often, but not automatically, and in Florida the homestead analysis has to be done first. A properly drafted trust can hold a Florida homestead without disturbing the exemption; a poorly drafted one can create a title problem and a tax problem at the same time. Have the deed and the trust prepared together by the same person.

How much does estate planning cost in Florida?

It varies with complexity, which is why I quote a flat fee before starting rather than after. See the fee table above for what I charge for each package. Be cautious of any quote given before anyone has asked how your property is titled or whether you have been married before — those two questions change the work more than any other.

How much does a simple will cost in Florida?

Less than a trust-based plan, and more than an online form. The relevant comparison is not form versus attorney on price; it is what each one costs when it fails. A will that is thrown out for a witnessing defect cost far more than the fee that was saved.

What is the average cost of a living trust in Florida?

Published averages are close to useless because they lump a single person with one bank account together with a couple holding four properties and a business. What actually moves the number is the number of parties, the number of real estate parcels that need deeds, whether a beneficiary needs protective terms, and whether the estate is large enough for tax planning. Ask for a flat fee against your own facts.

What makes a will valid in Florida?

It must be in writing and signed by the testator at the end, in the presence of two attesting witnesses, who must then sign in the presence of the testator and of each other. Add a self-proving affidavit before a notary. Miss any element and the will can be challenged on execution grounds alone, without anyone questioning what you actually wanted.

Can I create my own will in Florida?

You can. The formalities are where self-prepared wills fail most often, and the substance is where they fail most expensively — homestead, spousal rights, an ineligible personal representative and beneficiary designations that contradict the document. An unwitnessed handwritten will is void in Florida no matter how clear it is.

Do wills expire in Florida?

No. A will remains effective until revoked by a later will or codicil or by a physical act intended to revoke it. That said, a twenty-year-old will usually names people who have died, moved or fallen out of your life, and refers to accounts that no longer exist.

Are wills recorded in Florida, and do I have to file mine?

A will is not recorded during your lifetime and is not public while you are alive. It is deposited with the court after death by whoever holds it. Keep the signed original somewhere your family can actually find it, and tell them where.

What happens if I die without a will in Florida?

Florida’s intestacy statutes distribute your property in fixed shares to your surviving spouse and descendants, on a formula that changes depending on whether all of your children are also your spouse’s children. Nobody consults your wishes, and the outcome in a blended family is frequently the opposite of what everyone assumed.

What is the biggest mistake people make with wills?

Assuming the will controls everything. Retirement accounts, life insurance, annuities, payable-on-death accounts and jointly titled property all pass outside the will, and they typically make up most of the estate. The second biggest is signing a will and never touching it again through a divorce, a death, a move to Florida and the birth of three grandchildren.

What are the most common estate planning mistakes?

Beneficiary designations that contradict the documents. A trust that was signed but never funded. A homestead devise the constitution does not permit. A power of attorney missing the enumerated authorities the agent will actually need. Naming a non-resident who is ineligible to serve. And using an out-of-state plan in Florida without ever having it reviewed.

How often should I update my estate plan?

Every three to five years as a baseline, and immediately after a marriage, divorce, birth, death, business sale, significant change in assets, or a move to or from Florida. Review is not the same as rewriting — most reviews end with a small amendment or nothing at all.

What is a durable power of attorney in Florida?

A document authorizing an agent to act for you in financial and legal matters, which remains effective if you become incapacitated. In Florida it takes effect when signed rather than upon a later determination of incapacity, and specific “superpowers” have to be separately signed or initialed to be granted at all.

Does a durable power of attorney need to be notarized in Florida, and who can witness it?

Yes. It must be signed by the principal in the presence of two subscribing witnesses and acknowledged before a notary. Choose witnesses who are not the agent and who have no interest in your affairs — it costs nothing and removes an argument later.

When does a durable power of attorney become effective in Florida?

When you sign it. Florida eliminated springing powers for instruments executed on or after October 1, 2011, apart from a narrow military exception. If your document says it takes effect only upon a physician’s determination of incapacity, it was almost certainly drafted under another state’s law or before that change.

Does a Florida durable power of attorney cover medical decisions?

No. Health care decisions require a designation of health care surrogate under chapter 765. The two documents are separate, and you need both.

How do I revoke a durable power of attorney in Florida?

In writing, signed, while you still have capacity — and then delivered to the agent and to every bank, brokerage and institution holding a copy. It also terminates automatically at your death.

How do I set up a revocable living trust in Florida?

The trust instrument is drafted and executed, and then — this is the part that gets skipped — it is funded. Real estate is deeded into it, accounts are retitled, and beneficiary designations are coordinated with it. A trust that owns nothing distributes nothing, no matter how well it is written.

Does a Florida revocable trust need to be notarized?

A revocable trust that disposes of property at the settlor’s death must be executed with the same formalities Florida requires for a will — two witnesses — and in practice it is notarized as well. Deeds transferring real estate into the trust have their own execution and recording requirements.

What is the downside to a living trust in Florida?

Cost, the ongoing obligation to keep it funded, and the fact that it provides no protection from your own creditors while you are alive. It also does not override the homestead restrictions. Those are real limitations, and any honest discussion of a trust should include them.

Can you inherit a homestead exemption in Florida?

Not automatically. An heir must qualify in their own right, which requires making the property a permanent residence and applying for it. The accumulated Save Our Homes cap generally resets on a change of ownership, which can multiply the tax bill on a long-held Broward County home. Statutory exceptions preserve the cap for a surviving spouse, for a minor child taking by operation of law, and for a permanent resident who was dependent on the owner — but not for an adult child who inherits and lives elsewhere.

How much money can you inherit in Florida without paying taxes?

Florida imposes no inheritance tax and no state estate tax, so there is no Florida threshold at all. An inheritance is not income to the person who receives it. Federal estate tax applies only to estates above the federal exemption, and inherited retirement accounts carry their own income tax rules for the beneficiary.

Can my spouse override my will in Florida?

Effectively, yes. The elective share entitles a surviving spouse to claim thirty percent of the elective estate, which is defined broadly enough to reach revocable trust assets, joint accounts, payable-on-death accounts and life insurance cash value. It can be addressed by a valid marital agreement, not by drafting around it.

I just moved to Florida — is my out-of-state will still valid?

Usually valid, frequently not workable. A non-holographic will properly executed elsewhere is generally recognized here, but it may name a personal representative Florida will not appoint, devise a homestead in a way the constitution does not permit, or ignore the elective share. A review is far cheaper than the alternative.

What is the 5 by 5 rule in estate planning?

A trust provision letting a beneficiary withdraw each year the greater of five thousand dollars or five percent of the trust’s value, without the lapse of that right creating adverse gift tax consequences. It appears in trusts designed around gift and estate tax planning and is not something a typical Florida family plan needs.

What is the three-year rule in estate planning?

A federal rule pulling certain transfers made within three years of death back into the taxable estate — most commonly life insurance the decedent transferred but did not survive by three years. It is a reason to structure insurance ownership correctly at the outset rather than fixing it late.

What happens to my digital accounts and cryptocurrency when I die?

Chapter 740 governs fiduciary access to digital assets in Florida, and where a provider offers an online tool for designating what happens to an account, that designation generally controls over your will. Self-custodied cryptocurrency depends entirely on whether anyone can locate your keys — a legal document alone cannot recover them.

How do I find an estate planning attorney near me in Fort Lauderdale?

Searches for an estate planning lawyer near me, a Florida estate planning attorney near me, a Florida trust attorney near me or a Florida will attorney near me all resolve to the same practical test, and it is not distance. What you need is an attorney admitted in Florida who works with Florida homestead, Florida spousal rights and Florida execution formalities every week — not simply the nearest office. Several practices ranking for these searches operate from templates across dozens of states. My Fort Lauderdale office is downtown near Las Olas and my Coral Gables office serves Miami-Dade, and the questions in the comparison section above work on anyone you call. People find me as an estate planning lawyer Ft Lauderdale residents were referred to just as often as by search; either way the first conversation is the same.

Do I have to come to your Fort Lauderdale office?

Not always. Florida permits remote online notarization and electronic wills in defined circumstances, and much of the preparatory work happens by phone and email. Some signings are still better done in person, and I will tell you which and why rather than defaulting to whichever is more convenient for me.

¿Atiende clientes en español?

Sí. Hablo español y preparo y explico todos los documentos en español cuando el cliente lo prefiere.

Talk to a Fort Lauderdale estate planning attorney

If you have no plan, the fastest way to start is a conversation about what you own and who depends on you. If you have documents already — especially documents signed in another state — the fastest way to start is a review, because the answer is often that three of the five items are fine and one is a problem you did not know you had.

I am the attorney you will speak with, the one who drafts your documents and the one sitting across from you at the signing. That is what working with an estate planning attorney Fort Lauderdale clients keep for decades should look like. Call (305) 224-6811 or send me a message, and we will find out where you actually stand. If your matter reaches beyond Broward, I handle Florida estate planning statewide.

Estate planning attorney Fort Lauderdale FL · Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties

Lorenzo Law
12 SE 7th Street, Suite 701, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301
2850 Douglas Road, Suite 303, Coral Gables, FL 33134
(305) 224-6811 · jml@lorenzolaw.com