Updating Your Estate Plan After Divorce, Marriage, or a Move to Florida

Updating your estate plan after divorce, marriage, or a move to Florida means reviewing and re-executing your will, trust, powers of attorney, health care directives, and beneficiary designations so they reflect your current family, your current assets, and Florida law. These three life events each trigger distinct legal consequences—some automatic, some not—and an out-of-date plan can send your wealth to the wrong person, expose it to creditors, or force your family into probate court. For high-net-worth individuals especially, a stale plan is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make.

I have practiced estate planning and probate law in South Florida long enough to see the same pattern repeatedly: a sophisticated, successful person carefully builds a plan, then a major life change quietly breaks it. The plan looks fine sitting in a drawer. It is the moving on with life part—the new spouse, the finalized divorce, the relocation from New York or New Jersey to Boca Raton—that does the damage. Below is how each of these events affects your plan, and what to actually do about it.

Why Life Changes Break an Estate Plan

An estate plan is a snapshot. It is accurate the day you sign it and slowly drifts out of alignment with your real life from that point forward. Marriage, divorce, and relocation are the three changes most likely to create a gap between what your documents say and what you would actually want.

The danger is that the documents keep working—they just work toward the wrong result. A will that leaves everything to an ex-spouse is still a valid will. A trust funded with New York property still names New York trustees and references New York law. Beneficiary forms on a $2 million life insurance policy still list whoever you named in 2009. Nothing alerts you. The mismatch only surfaces when someone dies, and by then it is too late to fix.

Updating Your Estate Plan After Divorce

Divorce is the change clients most often assume takes care of itself. It does not. Florida law helps you in some places and leaves you completely exposed in others.

What Florida law revokes automatically

Under Florida Statutes § 732.507(2), a divorce or annulment automatically voids any provision of your will that benefits your former spouse—the will reads as though the ex-spouse died at the time of the divorce. Florida Statutes § 732.703 extends similar treatment to many beneficiary designations on assets like life insurance and certain accounts, and § 736.1105 applies a comparable rule to revocable trusts. So far, so reassuring.

What Florida law does not fix

The automatic revocation statutes have real limits, and the gaps are where people get hurt:

• Federal assets often override state law. ERISA-governed plans—most employer 401(k)s and pensions—follow the named beneficiary regardless of Florida’s revocation statute. If your ex is still on the form, your ex may still collect.
• Successor and contingent roles can remain. Your former in-laws or your ex’s relatives may still sit in line as successor trustees, personal representatives, or agents under a power of attorney.
• Powers of attorney and health care surrogates are not automatically purged the way wills are. You do not want your former spouse holding your durable power of attorney during a medical crisis.
• The statute can be undone by your own documents. If your will or settlement agreement expressly says the ex-spouse should still inherit, that intention controls.

After a divorce, the correct move is not to rely on the statute but to affirmatively rebuild: new will or amended trust, fresh durable power of attorney, new health care surrogate and living will, and a line-by-line audit of every beneficiary designation. For clients with significant wealth, this is also the moment to revisit asset protection structures that may have been built jointly and now need to be restructured around a single owner.

Updating Your Estate Plan After Marriage

Marriage cuts the other direction. Where divorce leaves an unwanted beneficiary in place, marriage can accidentally leave your new spouse with less than the law requires—or far more than you intended.

Florida’s spousal protections are strong

Florida gives surviving spouses rights that you cannot simply ignore in a will:

• The elective share. Under Florida Statutes §§ 732.201–732.2155, a surviving spouse is entitled to roughly 30% of the elective estate, even if your will leaves them nothing. The elective estate reaches well beyond probate assets—into certain trusts, joint accounts, and transfers—so plans designed to disinherit a spouse frequently fail.
• Homestead. Florida’s constitutional homestead protection (Article X, Section 4) sharply restricts how you can devise your primary residence if you are survived by a spouse or minor child. Try to leave the home to anyone else and the devise can be invalid, with the property passing instead to a life estate or statutory interest.
• Pretermitted spouse rights. Under § 732.301, if you married after signing your will and did not update it, your new spouse may claim an intestate share—as if you had no will at all as to them.

What to do when you remarry, especially in a blended family

Marriage planning is most delicate in second marriages where children from a prior relationship are involved. The classic conflict is wanting to provide for a new spouse during their lifetime while preserving the principal for your children. A common solution is a properly drafted trust—often a QTIP or marital trust—that supports the surviving spouse but directs the remainder to your children. Strategies such as can also balance lifetime use of a residence against an eventual transfer to the next generation, though the Florida homestead rules must be respected carefully.

If you and your spouse signed a prenuptial or postnuptial agreement, it should be coordinated with your estate documents, because a valid waiver of spousal rights changes what the elective share and homestead rules require.

Updating Your Estate Plan After a Move to Florida

Boca Raton sees a steady stream of new residents arriving from New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and beyond—frequently affluent retirees and business owners who built their plans under another state’s law. Their documents are usually valid in Florida. The problem is that valid is not the same as optimal.

Your out-of-state will is probably valid—but check it anyway

Under Florida Statutes § 732.502, a will validly executed in another state is generally honored in Florida, with one important exception: Florida does not recognize holographic (handwritten, unwitnessed) or oral wills, even if they were valid where signed. And Florida imposes strict rules on who may serve as your personal representative—out-of-state individuals must generally be close relatives—so an executor named in your old will may be disqualified here.

Why a Florida-specific update is worth doing

Relocating is the ideal moment for a full review, and not only for compliance reasons:

1. Domicile and taxes. Florida has no state estate tax and no state income tax. Establishing clear Florida domicile—and updating documents to reflect it—helps cut off your former high-tax state’s claim on your estate.
2. Homestead and creditor protection. Florida’s homestead exemption is among the most powerful asset-protection tools in the country, shielding your primary residence from most creditors without an acreage cap inside a municipality. Your plan should be drafted to capture, not accidentally forfeit, that protection.
3. Document mechanics differ. Florida has its own statutory requirements for durable powers of attorney (Chapter 709), health care surrogate designations and living wills (Chapter 765), and self-proving will affidavits. Out-of-state forms are often honored grudgingly, if at all, by Florida banks, hospitals, and title companies. Florida-native documents simply work more smoothly.
4. Trust situs and administration. If you have a revocable or irrevocable trust, moving may warrant changing the governing law, the trustee, or the trust situs to take advantage of Florida’s favorable trust code.

For families with assets or business interests still tied to another state—New York real estate, a closely held company, or income-producing property—coordination across jurisdictions matters. Sophisticated vehicles such as a illustrate how state-specific instruments can interact with a Florida-centered plan, particularly when there is exposure to long-term care costs or Medicaid considerations on assets left behind up north.

A Practical Checklist for Any Major Life Change

Whether you have divorced, married, or relocated, walk through the same core inventory:

• Revoke or amend your will and revisit your revocable living trust and its funding.
• Re-sign your durable power of attorney, health care surrogate designation, and living will under current Florida statutes.
• Audit every beneficiary designation: life insurance, retirement accounts, annuities, and transfer-on-death accounts—remembering that ERISA plans follow the form, not the statute.
• Confirm your personal representative and successor trustees are eligible and still appropriate.
• Review titling of real estate, especially homestead, and any joint or tenancy-by-the-entireties property.
• Revisit asset protection structures—LLCs, irrevocable trusts, and creditor-shielding arrangements—in light of your new circumstances.

Our Boca Raton estate planning attorneys handle exactly these transitions for high-net-worth clients, and you can read more about our approach to Florida estate planning. If you want to understand the foundational documents first, start with our overview of wills and trusts, and if a loved one has passed, see how the process works in Florida probate.

The Bottom Line

Marriage, divorce, and a move to Florida are not minor updates—they are events that change who inherits, who controls your affairs if you are incapacitated, and how much of your wealth survives taxes and creditors. Florida law fixes some of the fallout automatically and leaves the rest to you. The clients who fare best are the ones who treat each of these milestones as a prompt to sit down, review every document, and re-sign under Florida law. The cost of an update is trivial next to the cost of probate litigation, a forfeited homestead exemption, or a beneficiary form that quietly hands your estate to the wrong person.

If you have experienced any of these life changes, schedule a review before another year passes with a plan that no longer matches your life.

This article is general information, not legal advice. Statutes change and individual circumstances vary; consult a licensed Florida attorney about your specific situation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does divorce automatically remove my ex-spouse from my will in Florida?

Largely, yes. Under Florida Statutes § 732.507(2), divorce voids will provisions benefiting a former spouse, and similar rules apply to many beneficiary designations and revocable trusts. But ERISA-governed retirement plans follow the named beneficiary regardless, and powers of attorney and successor roles are not all automatically purged. You should affirmatively update every document rather than rely on the statute.

If I remarry, can I leave my new spouse out of my estate plan?

Not easily in Florida. A surviving spouse is entitled to an elective share of roughly 30% of the elective estate under §§ 732.201–732.2155, plus constitutional homestead protections, even if your will says otherwise. A valid prenuptial or postnuptial agreement can waive those rights, but absent one, attempts to disinherit a spouse usually fail.

Is my out-of-state will valid after I move to Florida?

Usually. Florida Statutes § 732.502 honors wills validly executed in another state, except holographic (handwritten, unwitnessed) and oral wills, which Florida never recognizes. However, your out-of-state personal representative may be disqualified, and your powers of attorney and health care documents may not be honored smoothly by Florida institutions, so a Florida-specific update is strongly recommended.

How soon after a major life change should I update my estate plan?

As soon as practical. Divorce, marriage, and relocation each change who inherits and who can act for you if you are incapacitated. Until you re-sign your documents under Florida law, your plan may direct assets incorrectly or expose them to taxes and creditors. Most clients should review their plan within a few months of any such event.

Why does moving to Florida matter for asset protection?

Florida offers no state estate tax, no state income tax, and one of the nation’s strongest homestead creditor exemptions for a primary residence. Establishing clear Florida domicile and drafting documents to capture these protections can significantly shield wealth, but only if your plan is structured correctly under Florida law rather than carried over unchanged from another state.