Estate planning attorney serving families in Clermont, Orlando, and other Florida communities.

Funding a trust means retitling your assets — your home, bank and investment accounts, and other property — into the trust’s name, or naming the trust as beneficiary where appropriate. Signing the trust document alone does nothing to protect those assets; a trust only controls what it actually owns. In Florida, an unfunded trust is one of the most common reasons a family ends up in probate court anyway. Funding usually means recording a new deed for real estate, updating titling with your bank or brokerage, and reviewing beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance. It isn’t a one-time task — anything acquired later needs to be titled correctly too, which Allison checks at every plan review.

As a general rule, review your plan every three to five years, and immediately after a major life event: marriage, divorce, a new child, the death of a beneficiary or personal representative, buying or selling a home, moving to or from Florida, or a significant change in what you own. Both Florida law and your family change over time, and a plan that fit five years ago may not fit today. Beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance deserve special attention, since they control who inherits those assets regardless of what your will or trust says. Treat your estate plan as something to maintain, not something to file away and forget — a short check-in costs far less than discovering a plan is outdated during a family crisis.

If you die without a will in Florida, state law decides who inherits your property, through what’s called intestate succession. Generally, a surviving spouse and children share the estate under a fixed formula that depends on whether the children are also the surviving spouse’s children. If you have no living spouse or children, Florida law works through a set list of relatives, which can mean your assets end up with people you never intended to provide for. Dying without a will also means your estate almost certainly goes through probate, with the court — not you — deciding who administers it and, if you have minor children, weighing in on who raises them. A will lets you make these decisions yourself instead of leaving them to a statute.

Generally, no. Florida has specific execution requirements that online templates often get wrong. A Florida will must be signed in the presence of two witnesses and is typically notarized as “self-proving” to avoid extra steps in probate; a template signed incorrectly can be challenged later. Trust templates raise a bigger issue: even a well-written trust protects nothing until it’s funded, and generic templates rarely walk you through retitling your home or accounts. Many also ignore Florida-specific issues, like homestead rules that affect how a house can be left to beneficiaries. A template can be a reasonable starting point for thinking through your wishes, but it is not a substitute for a plan built to Florida’s requirements and carried through to funding.

Usually, yes — spouses typically need their own wills, though the rest of the plan can be designed as a coordinated pair. Florida law gives a surviving spouse specific rights, including homestead protections and an elective share of the estate, that any plan needs to account for. If you use trusts, spouses can each have a separate revocable living trust, or in some cases a joint trust, depending on how you hold property. Powers of attorney and health care surrogate designations are always individual documents — one spouse cannot sign for the other. Allison plans for both of you together so the documents work as a system, but each spouse needs their own signed, valid documents to be protected.