Most Florida adults don't have a will. Not because they don't care what happens to their family — usually the opposite. It's because "I'll get to it" is an easy sentence to say and a will feels like a document for old age or a health scare, not for a random Tuesday.
Here's the problem with waiting: a will only works if you sign it before you need it.
What happens if you die without one
If you die in Florida without a valid will, you don't get a blank slate — you get Florida's intestacy statute, Chapter 732 of the Florida Statutes. It's a fixed formula, and it doesn't ask what you would have wanted.
A few examples of how that formula actually plays out:
- Married with kids from a prior relationship? Your spouse doesn't automatically inherit everything. Depending on the situation, your spouse may get only half of your probate estate, with the rest split among your children — including stepchildren of your spouse who aren't biologically yours, if state law treats them as your descendants.
- Unmarried partner, no kids? Your partner inherits nothing under intestacy, no matter how long you were together or how the bills were split. Everything goes to your legal next of kin — parents, siblings, or more distant relatives — by statute.
- Single with no children? Your estate passes to your parents, then siblings, then further down a fixed chain of relatives, whether or not you were close to them.
None of this is a will "filling in the gaps" for you. It's a complete substitute plan, written by the legislature for the average case, applied to your specific family whether it fits or not.
A will decides more than who gets what
A properly executed Florida will does three jobs at once:
- Names your Personal Representative — the person who settles your affairs, pays final debts, and distributes what's left. Without a will, the probate court appoints someone based on a statutory priority list, and it may not be who you'd choose.
- Directs where your property goes — specific gifts to specific people, and a residuary clause for everything else, in your words instead of a formula.
- Names a guardian for minor children, if you have them. This is the one intestacy has no answer for at all — without a nomination in a will, a court decides who raises your children with no guidance from you on record.
Who needs one most
Every adult benefits from having a will, but it stops being optional in a few situations:
- You have minor children and want a say in who raises them if something happens to both parents.
- You're in a second marriage, have stepchildren, or have children from a prior relationship — the situations where intestacy's fixed formula diverges furthest from what most people actually want.
- You own a home in Florida, since homestead property has its own layer of inheritance rules on top of ordinary intestacy.
- You have a specific person — not just "whoever's next in line" — you want handling your affairs.
What execution actually requires
Signing a will in Florida isn't just putting your name on paper. State law requires the testator to sign in the presence of two witnesses, who then sign in the testator's presence and each other's — and a notarized self-proving affidavit attached to the will, which lets the will be admitted to probate without tracking down the witnesses later to testify it's genuine. Skip any of these steps and a court can refuse to honor the document at all, regardless of what it says.
Where to start
A will doesn't have to be complicated to be valid — it has to be correctly executed and it has to actually say what you mean. SunstateDocs' Last Will & Testament walks you through a plain-English intake — no legal jargon, about 10 minutes — and generates a Florida-specific document with the self-proving affidavit and witness blocks already built in, delivered as an editable Word file the moment you're done.
This article is general information, not legal advice. SunstateDocs is not a law firm.