When and Why to Review Your Florida Estate Plan: A Boca Raton Attorney’s Guide

Reviewing your Florida estate plan means re-examining your existing will, revocable trust, powers of attorney, healthcare directives, and beneficiary designations to confirm they still reflect your wishes, your family, your assets, and current Florida and federal law. As a general rule, you should review the plan every three to five years and, more importantly, after any major life or financial event. A plan that was excellent the day you signed it can quietly become a liability if it is left untouched while your circumstances move on without it.

I have sat across the table from too many families in Boca Raton and across Palm Beach County who discovered, at the worst possible moment, that a document drafted a decade ago no longer did what anyone intended. An ex-spouse still named on a brokerage account. A trustee who had passed away. A homestead provision that accidentally tripped Florida’s constitutional restrictions. None of these were drafting failures. They were maintenance failures. Here is how to avoid them.

Why an estate plan is not a “set it and forget it” document

An estate plan is a snapshot. It captures your intentions, your relationships, and the legal landscape on one specific day. Everything in that snapshot is in motion. Your assets grow or shift. Children grow up, marry, divorce, or develop problems. The people you named as trustees and personal representatives age, move out of state, or fall out of your life. And the law itself changes, sometimes dramatically.

For high-net-worth individuals, the stakes are magnified. The difference between a current plan and a stale one can be measured in seven figures of avoidable estate tax, exposed assets, or family litigation. Asset protection structures in particular are sensitive to timing: a trust that was bulletproof under one set of facts can be vulnerable if it is funded incorrectly, left unfunded, or never updated to reflect new holdings.

Life events that should trigger an immediate estate plan review

Some changes can wait for your routine review. Others should send you to your attorney within weeks. The following events almost always warrant a fresh look:

• Marriage or remarriage. Florida grants a surviving spouse significant statutory rights, including the elective share under Florida Statutes Chapter 732, Part II, and the pretermitted spouse provisions of section 732.301. A will signed before a marriage may unintentionally disinherit, or over-provide for, a new spouse.
• Divorce. Under section 732.507(2), a dissolution of marriage voids provisions in your will favoring your former spouse, and section 736.1105 does the same for revocable trusts. But these statutes do not reach every asset, and they do not cure a stale plan. Beneficiary designations on life insurance and retirement accounts need separate attention.
• Birth or adoption of a child or grandchild. Florida’s pretermitted child statute, section 732.302, can give an omitted child a share of your estate. Better to address new heirs deliberately than to leave it to a default rule.
• Death or incapacity of a key fiduciary. If your named personal representative, trustee, agent under a power of attorney, or healthcare surrogate can no longer serve, the gap must be filled before it is needed.
• A significant change in net worth. A liquidity event, a business sale, an inheritance, or a real estate acquisition can push you past planning thresholds you previously did not need to worry about.
• Moving to or from Florida. Estate planning is intensely state-specific. A will and trust executed in New York, New Jersey, or Illinois may not align with Florida’s homestead, witnessing, and notarization rules.
• Health changes. A serious diagnosis for you or a beneficiary, including a disability, may call for a special needs trust to preserve eligibility for public benefits.

Financial and asset changes that quietly break a plan

Life events are easy to spot. The financial drift that undermines estate plans is more subtle, because nothing on paper looks wrong. Consider how a high-net-worth estate evolves over five years: a concentrated stock position is diversified, a vacation home is purchased, a closely held business is restructured, retirement accounts swell, and new accounts are opened at new institutions.

The trust document may still be perfect. The problem is funding. A revocable living trust controls only the assets actually titled in its name. If you created a trust to avoid probate and then bought a Boca Raton condominium in your individual name, that condominium is headed straight to probate court despite the trust sitting in your drawer. I tell every client the same thing: the trust is the bucket; the funding is what you put in it. An empty bucket protects nothing.

Beneficiary designations: the silent overrides

Retirement accounts, annuities, and life insurance pass by beneficiary designation, not by your will or trust. These designations override your estate planning documents entirely. A regular review should confirm that every designation is current, that contingent beneficiaries are named, and that the designations coordinate with the rest of the plan rather than fighting it. This is the single most common place where good plans go wrong.

Changes in the law that justify a review

Even if your life were perfectly static, the law moves. Two areas matter most for affluent Florida families.

First, federal estate and gift tax. The federal exemption is historically high but scheduled to change, and the rules around portability, lifetime gifting, and generation-skipping transfers are technical and time-sensitive. Strategies that made sense under one exemption level may be inefficient or even counterproductive under another. I do not cite a specific exemption figure here precisely because it changes; confirm the current number with your attorney and accountant before acting on it.

Second, Florida-specific statutory reform. Florida modernized its power of attorney law in 2011, and many older durable powers of attorney are now disfavored or treated skeptically by banks and title companies. Florida also enacted electronic wills legislation under section 732.521 and following. If your durable power of attorney predates the current statute, financial institutions may resist honoring it, leaving your agent powerless at the very moment you need them most.

Asset protection: where review matters most for high-net-worth clients

Boca Raton is home to business owners, physicians, executives, and retirees whose wealth makes them targets for creditors, litigants, and long-term care costs. For these clients, the estate plan and the asset protection plan are inseparable, and both decay without maintenance.

Florida offers powerful built-in protections, including the constitutional homestead exemption and statutory protections for life insurance, annuities, and certain retirement accounts under section 222.21. But these protections have limits and exceptions, and aggressive titling decisions made years ago may not survive scrutiny today. Tenancy by the entireties protection, for instance, evaporates on the death of a spouse or a divorce, leaving previously shielded assets exposed.

For clients weighing more advanced structures, the question is whether a trust is properly designed and, again, properly funded. Vehicles like a are built around irrevocability and look-back timing; reviewing them late, or funding them late, can defeat their entire purpose. Income-sensitive clients sometimes explore a to preserve benefit eligibility while still meeting living expenses. These strategies differ between Florida and New York, so the design must match the client’s residency and goals, and our Florida estate planning team coordinates the structure to the state where you actually live.

How often should you review your Florida estate plan?

Use a two-track schedule. Track one is the calendar: sit down with your attorney every three to five years even if nothing obvious has changed, because the law and your assets drift even when your life does not. Track two is event-driven: any of the triggers listed above should prompt a review regardless of when you last looked.

A productive review is not a re-signing ceremony. It is a structured audit. Here is the order I work through with clients:

1. Confirm your goals and your family situation are accurately reflected.
2. Verify every named fiduciary is still appropriate, alive, and willing.
3. Reconcile asset titling and trust funding against your current balance sheet.
4. Audit all beneficiary designations and contingent beneficiaries.
5. Re-test the plan against current Florida and federal law, including tax and powers-of-attorney rules.
6. Stress-test asset protection and homestead provisions for current exposures.
7. Update healthcare directives, HIPAA authorizations, and any digital asset provisions.

If you would like an outline of the core documents every Florida adult should have in place, our overview of wills and core documents is a useful starting point, and clients who want to understand what happens without a current plan can review how Florida probate actually works.

The cost of waiting

I have never met a family that regretted reviewing an estate plan too often. I have met many who paid dearly for reviewing it too late, in litigation, in taxes, and in the kind of conflict that fractures families for a generation. A review costs a fraction of any one of those outcomes, and it buys something that is genuinely priceless: the confidence that the plan on paper is the plan that will actually work.

If it has been more than three years since you last looked at your documents, or if any of the life events above has touched your family, treat that as your signal. Schedule a review with a Boca Raton estate planning attorney and bring your plan back into alignment with your life.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should I review my Florida estate plan?

Review it every three to five years as a routine matter, and immediately after any major life or financial event such as marriage, divorce, the birth of a child, a death among your fiduciaries, a significant change in net worth, or a move to or from Florida. The law also changes, so even a static life warrants a periodic re-check.

Does a Florida divorce automatically remove my ex-spouse from my estate plan?

Largely yes. Under Florida Statutes section 732.507(2), divorce voids will provisions favoring a former spouse, and section 736.1105 does the same for revocable trusts. However, these statutes do not cover everything. Beneficiary designations on life insurance and retirement accounts must be updated separately, so a post-divorce review is essential.

Why does trust funding matter so much during a review?

A revocable living trust only controls assets actually titled in its name. If you bought property or opened accounts in your individual name after creating the trust, those assets can go through probate despite the trust existing. A review reconciles your current balance sheet against what the trust actually holds and fixes any gaps.

Do I need to update an older durable power of attorney?

Often, yes. Florida significantly revised its power of attorney law in 2011, and banks and title companies may resist honoring older documents. If your durable power of attorney predates the current statute, a review can confirm whether it should be updated so your agent can actually act when needed.

How does asset protection affect when I should review my plan?

For high-net-worth clients, protection structures are timing-sensitive. Tools like a Medicaid asset protection trust depend on irrevocability and look-back periods, and protections such as tenancy by the entireties can disappear after a death or divorce. Reviewing or funding these vehicles late can defeat their purpose, so they deserve close attention during every review.