Free Guide · Florida Estate Planning

The Estate Plan Intent Audit

Fifteen checks on whether your plan explains itself.

Aspire Legal Solutions · Florida law · 15-question diagnostic

Most Florida estate plans do exactly what they were built to do. Accounts retitle, the personal representative is appointed, the trustee distributes. What the documents almost never carry is the reasoning.

In most states that gap is a relationship problem, and the standard answer is a no-contest clause that makes the question too expensive to ask. Florida took that answer away — Fla. Stat. § 732.517 and § 736.1108 make a penalty-for-contest provision unenforceable. So the question is coming, and § 733.107(2) decides who carries the burden of proof once it arrives.

Your plan has to answer for itself, at a moment when you are not there to do it.

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Get The Estate Plan Intent Audit

Fifteen questions that tell you, in about ten minutes, whether your plan records its reasons or only its decisions. Enter your details and the audit is sent straight to your inbox.

What is inside the audit

Eight pages, written for the person who signed the plan rather than the lawyer who drafted it.

What your plan may be relying on that does not work. Five questions on the clauses and habits that feel protective and are not.
What a plan that explains itself actually contains. Ten questions on where the reasoning belongs and who has to be able to find it.
Your Exposure Rating. Three bands, each with a plain read on where you stand and what to do first.
The five-step sequence. Starting with the step that is free, takes one afternoon, and makes the other four easy to draft.
A plain-English glossary. In terrorem clauses, the undue influence presumption, statements of intent, separate writings, and the trustee's duty to inform.

A high score does not mean your plan is defective. It means the plan records decisions without recording reasons — and in Florida, the reasons are the part that has to survive you. Unequal is perfectly defensible. Unexplained and unequal is what a contest is built out of, because silence is the blank space a dissatisfied beneficiary gets to fill in.

Three of the fifteen questions

If any of these gives you pause, the audit is worth ten minutes.

Does your will or revocable trust contain a no-contest clause?
Is the child who helps you most also the child your plan favors?
Does your plan divide anything unequally without saying why anywhere in the instrument?

The other twelve cover where an explanation has to live to carry weight, the signed separate writing for tangible personal property and what makes it operate, what a document should say when a business or licensed practice passes to one child, who on your side needs to know the reasoning exists, what your trustee is already required to disclose, which drafts and dated notes are worth preserving, and the quiet question almost nobody revisits. Download the audit to work through all fifteen.

Who this is for

Florida families whose plan divides anything unequally; business owners leaving a company or a licensed practice to one child and not the others; parents of a blended family; anyone whose closest child also holds the power of attorney or the health care surrogate designation; and executors and successor trustees who expect to be asked why.

If your plan treats your children differently for a reason you have never written down, question three is the one to read first.

Frequently asked questions

Doesn't a no-contest clause stop my children from fighting?

Not in Florida. Fla. Stat. § 732.517 makes a provision in a will purporting to penalize any interested person for contesting the will unenforceable, and § 736.1108 says the same for a trust instrument. There is no good-faith exception and no dollar threshold. Most of the country still enforces these clauses, which is why so many Florida plans contain one that does nothing.

Why does it matter which child helps me most?

Because closeness cuts both ways. Where a presumption of undue influence applies, Fla. Stat. § 733.107(2) shifts the burden of proof onto the person defending the gift. The child who earned your trust is the one who would have to show the gift was not procured by undue influence. The audit covers what rebuts that presumption.

Isn't a letter to my family good enough?

A letter has no custodian and no reliable date, and a trustee's duties run to the trust instrument rather than to a drawer or a login. A document the court is already construing is a different kind of evidence than a letter somebody produces afterward. The audit covers where the explanation belongs instead.

Who should run this audit?

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