Funding Your Trust: The Florida Step Most Families Skip

If you are the one your family calls when something goes wrong, you probably already did the responsible thing. You met with an attorney, signed a revocable living trust, and the binder has been on a shelf ever since. A trust controls only what has actually been moved into it.

In Florida that gap shows up twice. If you can no longer manage your affairs, a trust holding your accounts lets your successor trustee step in quietly. If it holds nothing, your family may have to ask a judge to appoint a guardian. At your death, whatever is still in your name alone goes through probate, whatever the trust says.

What funding actually means

Funding moves accounts and property out of your individual name and into your trust's name. Florida real estate, bank and credit union accounts, non-retirement investment accounts, notes payable to you, and business interests your agreements allow usually belong inside. It happens three ways.

• Retitling. The deed or account registration changes from "Maria Rivera" to "Maria Rivera, Trustee of the Maria Rivera Revocable Trust dated June 1, 2026." Florida real estate needs a new deed, signed properly and recorded in the county where the property sits.
• Assignment. Items with no title, such as jewelry, artwork, or a collection, move by written assignment.
• Beneficiary designation. Some accounts stay in your name and name a beneficiary. Florida pay-on-death accounts and securities registered in beneficiary form do pass outside your estate, but they do nothing if you become incapacitated.

What Florida does when nothing was moved

Start with the word. Florida does not use conservatorship for an adult who can no longer manage money. Conservators here belong to Chapter 747, for people who are missing or absent. For an incapacitated Florida resident it is a guardianship under Chapter 744: a petition, an examining committee, a judge, and reports year after year.

After a death, property still in your sole name goes to probate. Summary administration is the shorter track, available when the estate subject to administration, less property exempt from creditor claims, does not exceed $150,000, or when the person has been dead more than two years. That ceiling rose from $75,000 on July 1, 2026 under Chapter 2026-57, Laws of Florida, so if your loved one died before that date, ask us which limit applies. Above the line is formal administration, with a personal representative and a creditor period that generally runs three months from first publication of the notice.

The Florida house is its own conversation

• Your Florida homestead can sit inside a revocable trust and keep its homestead tax exemption. Florida extends the exemption to a person whose right to live there comes from an instrument granting a beneficial interest for life, which counts as equitable title.
• Florida has no transfer-on-death deed. It does recognize the enhanced life estate deed, known as a Lady Bird deed: you keep the right to live in, sell, mortgage, or take back the property, and at death it passes to whom you named, without probate.
• Both keep your power to revoke, so section 732.4017 does not take either one out of Florida's homestead devise rules. If a spouse or minor child survives you, the constitutional homestead rules still decide who gets the house, and neither a trust nor a deed rewrites them.

Trust, Lady Bird deed, or leave it where it is: the answer turns on your spouse, your children's ages, your mortgage, your title insurer, and whether long-term care may be ahead. That is a conversation, not a form.

Vehicles, small accounts, and Florida's short paths

• Vehicles. Florida allows no beneficiary on a car title. Heirs can often transfer it with an affidavit instead of a probate order when the estate is not indebted and the surviving spouse and heirs agree on the division, under section 319.28. That is why cars usually stay outside the trust here.
• Small bank balances. A Florida financial institution may pay a surviving spouse, adult child, adult descendant, or parent up to $2,000 total across the decedent's accounts there, on a sworn affidavit, no earlier than six months after the death, under section 735.303. That figure was $1,000 before July 1, 2026.
• Disposition without administration. For someone who died without a will leaving only exempt personal property plus non-exempt personal property of $20,000 or less, along with funeral costs and the last 60 days of medical bills, gone more than a year with nothing pending, section 735.304 lets the court release the property without opening a case. That figure was $10,000 before July 1, 2026.

These doors rescue a small estate. They are not a plan, and none of them reaches the house. Two things stay out of the trust on purpose: retirement accounts, where you change the beneficiary rather than the owner because retitling an IRA or a 401(k) can trigger income tax now, and custodial accounts you hold for a grandchild, where the child already owns the money and the fix is naming a successor custodian.