What happens to your $15 million estate if you die tomorrow without a will? In Florida, if you die without a will, decisions are made according to state law – not your wishes. This means your wishes about who inherits your assets, who manages your estate, and how your wealth gets distributed have no bearing on the final outcome.
At Turk Law Group, our experienced Probate & Estate Administration lawyers in Boca Raton explain the major issues intestate estates cause families and how you can avoid these problems entirely.
With nearly twenty years serving affluent South Florida families, we understand the devastating consequences of inadequate planning for families that do not have a proper estate plan in place that protects substantial wealth across generations.
Contact Turk Law Group today to schedule a consultation for your estate plan. Make sure your wealth is transferred according to your wishes, not the state’s predetermined formulas.
Who Decides What Happens to My Assets If I Die Without a Will?
A Florida probate court takes control of your estate if you die without a valid will. The court appoints a personal representative and directs distribution according to Florida Statutes Chapter 732. This process follows a predetermined formula based solely on your family structure. Your intentions, verbal promises, and actual family circumstances are legally irrelevant.
The court-appointed personal representative may not be the person you would have chosen. Most critically for wealthy families, intestacy eliminates your ability to:
- Provide Differential Support Based on Need: You cannot increase distributions to heirs who need financial support while reducing amounts to those who are financially secure.
- Protect Assets From Irresponsible Family Members: You cannot safeguard your wealth from heirs with addiction issues, poor financial judgment, or estrangement from the family.
- Provide for Non-Relatives: You cannot leave assets to a long-term partner, stepchildren, key employees, or charitable causes that matter to you.
- Create Protective Trusts: You cannot shield assets from beneficiaries’ creditors, divorces, or poor financial decisions through trust structures.
- Direct Specific Assets Strategically: You cannot pass your business to the child who works there or your vacation home to the family member who uses it most.
Without a will, the state’s inflexible rules control everything, and the actual distribution formula creates even more problems for wealthy families.
How Does Florida Divide Assets When There’s No Estate Plan?
Florida’s intestacy laws follow a rigid hierarchy that ignores your actual wishes and family circumstances. The distribution depends entirely on which relatives survive you, with no consideration given to individual needs, contributions to your wealth, or family dynamics.
The state divides your estate according to these inflexible rules:
- Married With No Children From Other Relationships: Your surviving spouse receives your entire estate, regardless of whether you wanted to provide for other family members or charities.
- Married With Children From a Prior Relationship: Your spouse receives only half of your estate. All of your children, from any relationship, split the other half equally.
- Unmarried With Children: Your children divide everything equally, even if one child is financially secure while another desperately needs support.
- No Spouse or Children: Your assets pass to parents, then siblings, then more distant relatives in a specific statutory order.
- No Living Relatives at All: The State of Florida claims your entire estate through a process called escheat.
This one-size-fits-all approach creates serious consequences for wealthy families. Equal distribution ignores the reality that one adult child might be a successful executive while another struggles with addiction or financial irresponsibility. Your business interests get divided among all children regardless of their involvement or business acumen. Investment portfolios and real estate holdings are split into fractional interests with no management structure, and assets pass outright to heirs with no trust protection from creditors, divorces, or lawsuits.
What Problems Does Intestacy Create for Blended Families in Boca Raton?
Intestacy laws create automatic conflicts in second marriages because Florida’s distribution formula cannot account for the complex dynamics between current spouses and children from previous relationships. The statutory rules guarantee tension, potential litigation, and outcomes that likely contradict your actual intentions.
When you have children from a previous relationship, Florida law mandates that your current spouse receives only half of your estate, while your children from any relationship split the remaining half equally. This forced division creates immediate conflict between your spouse and your adult children, often leading to years of litigation and damaged family relationships.
Florida’s Homestead Rules Complicate Everything Further
Florida’s unique homestead protections add another layer of complexity. If you own your primary residence and have minor children, your surviving spouse may receive only a “life estate” in the home rather than full ownership. Your spouse can live there but cannot sell the property or leverage its equity. After your spouse dies or vacates the home, ownership passes to your children as remainder beneficiaries.
This restriction can trap your spouse in a home they cannot afford to maintain and prevent them from downsizing or relocating when needed. For wealthy families with valuable South Florida properties, these homestead complications can tie up millions in illiquid real estate.
Stepchildren Receive Nothing Under Intestacy
Florida law does not recognize stepchildren as heirs unless you legally adopted them. Your spouse’s children from a previous marriage receive no inheritance through intestacy rules, even if you helped raise them for decades and consider them part of your family. Only legal adoptions or a properly executed will can provide for stepchildren.
Can Intestacy Laws Protect My Business and Investment Assets?
No. Intestacy provides zero asset protection and can destroy carefully built business operations. All assets pass outright to heirs with no trust structures, leaving them immediately vulnerable to your beneficiaries’ creditors, lawsuits, and divorces.
For business owners, the consequences are particularly severe. Your business interests get divided according to the statutory formula, potentially splitting ownership among heirs who have never worked together or have conflicting visions for the company. Partnership and LLC interests may violate existing operating agreements or trigger forced buyouts at the worst possible time.
Investment portfolios get distributed without spendthrift provisions, and real estate holdings are split into fractional interests with no management structure. This operational chaos can force asset sales at significant losses, destroying value you spent decades building.
Intestacy Eliminates All Tax Planning Opportunities
Intestacy is one of the most expensive ways to transfer substantial wealth because it eliminates every sophisticated tax planning strategy wealthy families need. Assets pass through probate under rigid statutory rules with no ability to optimize tax treatment, leverage exemptions strategically, or structure transfers tax-efficiently.
While recent federal legislation has increased estate tax exemptions to $13.99 million per person in 2025 (rising to $15 million in 2026), many high-net-worth Florida families still face significant tax exposure without proper planning. More importantly, intestacy prevents you from using the sophisticated strategies that preserve wealth beyond simply avoiding estate taxes.
Critical tax planning opportunities lost through intestacy include:
- Estate Tax Minimization Strategies: No ability to use bypass trusts, credit shelter trusts, or other structures that maximize both spouses’ estate tax exemptions and protect assets for future generations.
- Generation-Skipping Transfer Planning: No way to structure transfers that pass wealth to grandchildren while minimizing generation-skipping transfer (GST) taxes, which apply at a flat 40% rate on transfers that skip a generation.
- Charitable planning: No opportunity to reduce your taxable estate through charitable bequests, charitable remainder trusts, or donor-advised funds that provide both tax benefits and philanthropic impact.
- Strategic Use of Current Exemptions: While estate tax exemptions are currently set at favorable levels, future legislative changes remain possible. Intestacy eliminates your ability to leverage current law through lifetime gifting strategies, irrevocable trusts, and other techniques that lock in today’s favorable tax treatment.
- Advanced Trust Structures: No ability to establish intentionally defective grantor trusts (IDGTs), spousal lifetime access trusts (SLATs), or other sophisticated structures that remove asset appreciation from your taxable estate while maintaining family access to wealth.
- Basis Step-Up Optimization: No control over which assets pass to which beneficiaries to maximize income tax benefits from the basis adjustment that occurs at death. Strategic asset allocation can save heirs hundreds of thousands in capital gains taxes.
- State Tax Considerations: Florida has no state estate tax, but if you own property in other states or have beneficiaries living in states with estate or inheritance taxes, intestacy eliminates planning opportunities to minimize those state-level taxes.
For example, a $20 million estate passing through intestacy to children might avoid federal estate tax under current exemption levels, but it misses opportunities to:
- Protect $10-15 million in growth over the next generation through dynasty trust structures
- Save beneficiaries $800,000+ in capital gains taxes through strategic basis planning
- Shield assets from beneficiaries’ creditors, divorces, and poor financial decisions through trust protection
Even more critically, intestacy offers zero flexibility if tax laws change. Estates that seem “safe” under today’s $13.99 million exemption could face unexpected tax exposure if future legislation reduces exemptions, changes tax rates, or modifies how assets are valued. Proper estate planning builds in flexibility to adapt to changing tax laws—something intestacy can never provide.
Your Family Will Face Expensive, Public Probate Proceedings
Intestate estates require full probate court supervision, exposing your family’s private financial matters to public scrutiny. The process typically takes six to twelve months or longer for complex estates.
Everything Becomes Public Record
Asset values, creditor claims, family disputes, and beneficiary identities become accessible to anyone who requests court files. Business competitors can access sensitive operational and valuation information. Opportunists and scammers routinely target wealthy probate estates visible in public records.
Costs and Delays Accumulate Quickly
Legal fees, court costs, and personal representative fees add up throughout the lengthy process. Your family cannot access or distribute assets without court approval. Real estate transactions and business decisions require court permission, creating delays that force sales at unfavorable terms or cost hundreds of thousands in lost opportunities.
Beyond the immediate costs, intestate estates miss opportunities for sophisticated tax planning that could save hundreds of thousands or millions in taxes across multiple generations—losses that far exceed probate fees and court costs.
Proper estate planning with trusts can avoid probate entirely, maintaining complete privacy while eliminating court-imposed delays and reducing costs.
Wealthy Families Need Customized Plans, Not State-Written Default Rules
Florida’s intestacy laws were designed for simple families and modest assets. They fall far short of what high-net-worth families with business interests, blended families, and multi-generational wealth goals actually need.
Sophisticated Strategies Require Intentional Planning
Every wealthy family needs customized solutions that address their unique circumstances, such as:
- Asset protection trusts to shield wealth from creditors and divorces before problems arise.
- Dynasty trusts that protects assets across multiple generations while minimizing transfer taxes.
- Business succession plans to ensure operational continuity and prevent forced liquidations.
- Tax-efficient structures that preserve maximum wealth for heirs through strategic gifting, trust planning, and basis optimization.
- Charitable planning to create lasting legacies while reducing tax burdens
.These sophisticated strategies require months of careful planning and coordination among legal, financial, and tax advisors. They cannot be created retroactively or implemented in emergencies.
The Risks of Not Creating Your Estate Plan Are Real
Market changes, family transitions, and health events occur without warning. Creating a comprehensive estate plan before problems arise is essential for protecting your wealth and your family.
Timing matters for several critical reasons:
- Asset Protection Must Be Proactive: Transfers made after creditor claims emerge, lawsuits are filed, or divorces are initiated face significant legal challenges. Florida courts can “claw back” assets transferred with the intent to avoid creditors. Asset protection strategies only work when implemented well before problems appear.
- Tax Laws Can Change: While current estate tax exemptions are favorable, legislative changes remain possible in future years. Having a sophisticated plan in place allows you to adapt to tax law changes and take advantage of current provisions before they potentially become less favorable.
- Family Circumstances Evolve: Children’s marriages, financial situations, and personal challenges change over time. Business partnerships shift. Health issues emerge. An estate plan created today can be updated as circumstances change, but having no plan at all leaves your family vulnerable to whatever situation exists at your death.
- Planning Complexity Takes Time: High-net-worth estate plans involving business succession, asset protection trusts, multi-generational wealth transfer, and tax optimization require months to design and implement properly. These strategies cannot be rushed or created in an emergency.
- Business Continuity Takes Advance Preparation: If you own a business, your operating agreements, buy-sell arrangements, key person insurance, and succession plans must be coordinated with your estate plan. Waiting until a health crisis or unexpected death makes this coordination impossible.
Every day without a comprehensive estate plan puts your life’s work, your family’s financial security, and your business operations at unnecessary risk. The state’s default intestacy rules provide no protection for the wealth you’ve spent decades building.
Live in Boca Raton? Contact Turk Law Group Today: We Can Help You Create an Estate Plan That Protects Your Wealth
Dying without a will in Florida surrenders complete control to state default rules that provide zero asset protection and create expensive problems for your family.
At Turk Law Group, our experienced Boca Raton estate planning attorneys help high-net-worth families create customized plans that address every aspect of wealth transfer and asset protection.
Don’t let Florida’s default rules determine your legacy. Call today to schedule a comprehensive estate planning consultation. We will analyze your specific situation, including your business interests, family structure, and wealth transfer goals, and create a customized plan. We ensure your plan protects your assets, minimizes taxes, and ensures your wealth passes according to your wishes, not Florida’s predetermined formulas.