By Laurie E. Ohall, Florida Board-certified Elder Law Attorney
It’s a question that comes up more often than you might think. Relationships change. Families experience conflict, estrangement or circumstances that make you reconsider who should inherit from your estate. If you’re wondering whether you can remove someone from your will, the short answer is yes, but how you do it matters enormously.
You Have the Right To Change Your Mind
In Florida, you have the legal right to revise your will at any time while you are alive and mentally competent. That includes removing a beneficiary entirely, reducing what someone receives, or restructuring your estate plan to reflect your current wishes.
What you cannot do is simply cross out a name or write changes in the margins and call it done. Informal alterations like that are not legally valid and can create serious problems for your family down the road.
The Right Way To Remove Someone
The proper way to update your will is to execute a new will or a codicil, which is a formal amendment to an existing will. Your new document should clearly revoke prior versions to avoid any confusion about which version controls.
You may be surprised to learn that simply not mentioning someone in a new will isn’t always enough — particularly when it comes to children. Florida law has specific protections for overlooked or ‘pretermitted’ heirs, meaning a child who isn’t mentioned may still have a legal claim to a portion of your estate. Intentional exclusions need to be handled carefully and explicitly.
What About Spouses?
Removing a spouse is more complicated. Florida’s elective share law gives a surviving spouse the right to claim a portion of your estate regardless of what your will says. And if you have a house in Florida, there are specific rules about who you can leave it to if you are married.
Don’t Forget the Rest of Your Plan
A will is only one piece of your estate plan. If you’ve named someone as a beneficiary on a life insurance policy, retirement account or transfer-on-death account, those designations pass outside of your will entirely. Updating your will without reviewing your beneficiary designations can leave assets to someone you intended to exclude.
If your relationships or circumstances have changed, your estate plan should reflect that.