If you haven’t reviewed your Florida estate plan in the last few years—or confirmed that your named decision-makers, property titling, and beneficiary forms still match your actual life—it’s worth a checkup. Having a plan isn’t the same as having a plan that still works: a plan signed years ago keeps saying exactly what it said then, even after the people, property, and circumstances behind it have changed. Below are the twelve things that should be true about your plan right now, organized by the people you’ve named, the property you own, the paperwork that controls more than your will does, and what’s changed most recently — plus what to do if your plan touches a business.
Why a Review Matters More Than Awareness
October 19 through 25 is National Estate Planning Awareness Week. Congress created it in 2008, and the stated reason was that most American families either don’t have an estate plan or don’t understand the one they have.
In our experience across Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach, the second half of that sentence causes more damage than the first. A family with no plan at least knows they have a problem. A family with a 2014 plan and a 2026 life usually believes they’re covered, right up until the day they find out they aren’t.
So this is a checkup, not a sales pitch. Twelve things that should be true about your plan right now. Read through, note the ones that make you pause, and either fix them yourself or bring the list to whoever drafted your documents.
If you don’t have a plan at all, read it anyway. It’s a fair preview of what you’d be deciding.
Estate plans aren’t like the wills in movies, sealed in a drawer and opened dramatically after the funeral. They’re working documents that depend on facts: who is alive, who you trust, what you own, and how each account is titled. Change any of those facts, and the document keeps saying exactly what it said, which may no longer be what you’d want it to say.
Most probate failures aren’t drafting failures. The attorney did fine. Life moved, and nobody updated the file.
The People
1. Everyone You Named Is Still Alive, Still Willing, and Still Someone You’d Choose
Personal representative. Successor trustee. Health care surrogate. Guardian for minor children. These were good choices the day you signed. The question is whether they’re still good choices today. The brother who was responsible in 2015 may not be now, and the friend you named may have moved out of state or simply drifted out of your life.
Changing your mind here isn’t a betrayal. That’s the whole point of having documents you can amend.
2. Every Role Has a Backup
One name in a role is a single point of failure. If your only named personal representative dies before you do, declines to serve, or can’t serve, the decision goes to a judge using a legal order of preference instead of yours. Name a second person for every role. For the roles that really matter, name a third.
3. No Former Spouse Is Still Sitting Anywhere in Your File
Florida law addresses some of this automatically after a divorce, but “some” is doing real work in that sentence. The automatic rules don’t cover every document or account, and they don’t help if the divorce was never finalized or if you signed the document afterward. This is worth checking line by line rather than assuming it sorted itself out.
The Property
4. The House Is Titled the Way Your Plan Assumes It Is
This is the most common gap we find, by a wide margin. A trust only controls what has actually been put into it. If the deed still shows your individual name and the plan assumed the house was in the trust, the house goes through probate no matter what the trust document says about it.
You can check this yourself in about two minutes. Pull up your county property appraiser’s site and check the owner name on your house.
5. Nothing Quietly Left the Trust During a Refinance
Some lenders require you to take a property out of a trust to close a refinance, with the deed back into the trust to follow afterward. Sometimes the deed back never happens. Nobody is being careless on purpose; it’s the last step in a long closing that everyone assumes someone else handled.
If you’ve refinanced since you signed your plan, check the current deed. Don’t assume the closing package covered it.
6. Homestead Has Been Accounted For
Florida’s homestead protections are unusually strong, and they come with unusual restrictions on who you can leave the home to, especially if you have a spouse or minor children. A plan that treats the house like any other asset can collide with those restrictions in surprising ways.
If your documents don’t mention homestead anywhere, ask about that.
The Paperwork
7. Your Beneficiary Designations Match Your Plan
Retirement accounts, life insurance, annuities, and payable-on-death bank accounts pass by designation. In most cases, the form on file with the institution controls where the money goes, and your will does not override it.
This is how a carefully drafted plan gets undone by a form somebody filled out on their first day at a job years ago. Log in to each account and actually read the beneficiary line. While you’re there, check the contingent beneficiary, too. Many people name a primary and leave the backup blank.
8. Your Durable Power of Attorney Is Current Enough That a Bank Will Accept It
A power of attorney is only useful if an institution honors it. Florida’s requirements for these documents have changed over the years, and older instruments sometimes draw pushback from banks and brokerages even when they remain valid. The time to find that out is not the week somebody needs to use it.
If yours is old and has never been tested, that’s a short conversation worth having.
9. A Health Care Surrogate and a Living Will Exist, and Someone Has Copies
These documents matter on the worst day, and they do nothing sitting in a filing cabinet at home while you’re in a hospital in another county. Give copies to the people you named. Put a copy somewhere your family can reach without you, and tell them where.
The Present Tense
10. Anything You’ve Acquired Since Signing Has Been Dealt With
A new brokerage account. A rental property. A business you started. A boat. An inheritance you received. A plan governs what you bring into it, and assets you acquire after signing often sit entirely outside it. Nobody notices until it’s too late to fix easily.
11. Your Digital Accounts Are Addressed Somewhere
Email, photo storage, password managers, cloud accounts, anything holding a balance. Most families can’t get into any of it, and some of it is genuinely irreplaceable. You don’t need an elaborate solution. You need a written list and one trusted person who can reach it.
12. A Specific Human Being Knows Where the Originals Are
Not “the family knows generally.” A named person who could get in a car, drive to a place, and produce the document. Original documents matter in Florida probate in ways that copies do not always. If no one can find the original, the process starts at an entirely avoidable disadvantage.
What Changed for 2026, and What Didn’t
You may have read that the federal estate tax exemption was about to drop sharply. It didn’t. As of 2026, the federal estate and gift tax exemption is $15 million per person, or $30 million for a married couple, and the 2025 federal tax law made those amounts permanent rather than scheduled to expire.
Florida, separately, has no state estate tax and no inheritance tax.
Put those together, and the picture is straightforward: the overwhelming majority of Florida families will never owe federal estate tax, and planning around that threat is not the reason to do any of this. The reasons are the twelve items above. Keeping your family out of a court process. Making sure the right person has authority if you can’t make decisions yourself. Making sure what you own ends up where you intended it to go.
If your estate is anywhere near those figures, the math changes and gets much more interesting, and it’s worth a conversation rather than a blog post.
If You Own a Business, Add Three More
Business owners have a fourth category, and it’s usually the least examined part of the estate even though it’s often the largest.
- Your operating agreement or shareholder agreement names a successor manager or officer, so somebody has authority to sign for the company the day after you’re gone. Not who would step up. Who has authority in writing.
- There’s a buy-sell agreement, and it’s funded. An unfunded buy-sell is a promise to buy something with money nobody has.
- The business interest itself is titled consistently with the rest of your plan. This is the asset most often left out of a trust entirely.
If any of those three made you uncomfortable, watch our webinar replay, Business Owners and Trusts: What You Need to Know, for a closer look at what should be in place — or call us at (954) 580-3690 or reach out through our contact page to talk through your business succession planning directly.
How This Plays Out in Practice
A trust that was never fully funded. A couple sets up a revocable living trust specifically to keep their house out of probate. Years later, one spouse passes away, and the family discovers the deed was never retitled into the trust’s name — it still reads in the couple’s individual names. The house goes through probate anyway, despite the trust sitting in a drawer saying it shouldn’t have to.
A beneficiary form nobody updated. A man divorces, updates his will, and assumes he’s covered. He never logs back into the 401(k) he opened at his first job, where his ex-spouse is still listed as primary beneficiary. When he passes away, the retirement account pays out to her directly — the will never gets a say, because the form on file controls.
A business with no successor on paper. A small business owner dies unexpectedly. Everyone assumed his adult daughter, already working in the business, would simply take over. But the operating agreement names no successor manager, so no one has signing authority while the family and the courts sort out who does — freezing payroll, vendor payments, and client contracts for weeks.
When to Speak with an Estate Planning Attorney
What a Plan Review Actually Looks Like
A review is not a re-do. You bring your documents, we compare them to the facts of your life today, and we tell you what, if anything, no longer works.
Most reviews end with small updates or with nothing at all. “You’re in good shape, come back in a few years” is a completely normal outcome and a good one. The bad outcome is when nobody ever checks, and the family finds out during probate.
If you’re already an SJF Law Group client, this review is part of what we do for you every year, at no additional cost. If you’re not yet a client, we start with a complimentary consultation with an attorney, who will review your goals, situation, and options.
If you only do one thing this week, start with item 4 or item 7 — look up the deed on your own house, or log in and read the beneficiary line on one retirement account. Both take minutes, and between them they account for more avoidable probate than anything else on this list.
And if something on this page made your stomach drop, that’s exactly what a plan review is for. Call us at (954) 580-3690 or reach out through our contact page to schedule a time.
SJF Law Group is an estate planning and probate firm in Plantation, Florida, serving Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach Counties. This article is general information about Florida estate planning and is not legal advice for your situation.
FAQ
How often should I update my estate plan in Florida?
An estate plan has no legal expiration date. A practical rule is to read your documents every three years, and to call sooner than that if someone named in them dies or divorces, if you buy or sell property, if you open new accounts, or if your family changes shape. Most of the plans that fail in probate were never revisited, not badly drafted.
Does my will still work after a divorce in Florida?
Florida law treats certain provisions in favor of a former spouse as void once a divorce is final. But the automatic rules don’t reach every document and every account, and they do nothing at all if the divorce was never finalized or if the document was signed after it. Treat a divorce as a reason to review everything rather than as a fix that happened on its own.
Do I need to change anything after refinancing my house?
Often, yes. Some lenders require the property to come out of your trust in order to close, with a deed putting it back afterward. That last deed is sometimes never recorded. Look up your current deed on your county property appraiser’s site rather than assuming the closing package handled it.
Is a will I signed in another state valid in Florida?
Usually, if it was validly executed under the law of the state where you signed it, but there are meaningful exceptions. Florida does not accept handwritten wills that weren’t witnessed the way Florida requires, even when they’re perfectly valid where they were signed. If you moved here with an out-of-state plan, have someone read it.
What happens if I die without a will in Florida?
Florida’s intestacy statutes decide who inherits, in a fixed order that begins with your spouse and children, and a judge appoints whoever will administer the estate. Sometimes that result is close to what you’d have chosen. Sometimes it isn’t, particularly in blended families. Either way, nobody in your family gets to adjust it.
What does a plan review cost?
If you’re already a client, nothing, because annual plan reviews are complimentary. If you’re not yet a client, we offer a complimentary consultation with an attorney first to talk through your goals and situation before outlining what a fuller review would involve.
About This Article
Written by Samantha Fitzgerald, Esq., Founder & Managing Attorney at SJF Law Group.
Learn more about our Wills, Trusts & Estate Planning services, or read the related post, How Avoiding Probate Can Save You Time, Money, and Hassle.
Ready to make sure your plan still says what you want it to? Schedule a complimentary consultation with our team today.
