Plantation Lady Bird Deed Attorney

Q: What is per stirpes and why does it belong in my deed?

Per stirpes means by the branch. If you name three children per stirpes and one dies before you leaving two children of their own, that branch's one-third does not disappear and does not get split among the surviving siblings. It passes down to the two grandchildren, who share it. The alternative is that the surviving beneficiaries divide everything, which cuts out the grandchildren entirely. Neither answer is right or wrong. What is wrong is leaving the deed silent so nobody knows which one you intended.

Q: How often should I review a Lady Bird Deed?

Review it after any event that changes your family: a death, a divorce, a marriage, a birth, an estrangement, or a beneficiary developing a disability or a creditor problem. Do not treat a recorded deed as finished business. Because you keep the power to revoke, updating it is straightforward while you are competent, and impossible afterward. Plantation is a long-tenure community where twenty or thirty years can pass between recording a deed and needing it, and a great deal changes in that time.

Q: Where do I record a Lady Bird Deed for Plantation property?

With the Broward County Records, Taxes and Treasury Division, located at 115 South Andrews Avenue, Room 114, Fort Lauderdale. This surprises people because in most Florida counties the Clerk of the Circuit Court handles recording. In Broward it is a county division, not the Clerk. Recording fees are $10.00 for the first page and $8.50 for each additional page, plus $1.00 for each name over four that has to be indexed, which is worth noting on a deed that names several contingent beneficiaries.

Q: Will a Plantation Lady Bird Deed affect my homestead exemption?

No. You remain the owner of the property for every practical and legal purpose during your lifetime, so your homestead exemption and your accumulated Save Our Homes assessment cap both continue undisturbed. The exemption and the cap do not transfer to your beneficiaries at your death. A beneficiary who moves in must apply for their own exemption with the Broward County Property Appraiser, and the assessment resets.

Written and reviewed by Yanitza Schoonover, Florida probate and estate planning attorney The Schoonover Law Firm, P.A. · Updated August 2026

A Plantation Lady Bird Deed, known formally as a Florida enhanced life estate deed, lets your home pass directly to the beneficiaries you name at your death, with no Broward County probate case. Nothing changes while you are alive: you stay on title, you keep your homestead exemption, and you can live in the house, rent it, refinance it, sell it, or revoke the deed entirely.

Plantation is a settled, long-tenure suburb: 64.3% owner-occupied, a median owner-occupied value of $483,500, and 16.9% of residents aged 65 or older. Families here tend to buy once and stay. That is precisely what makes this page's subject matter urgent.

Because when a deed is recorded at 62 and used at 91, twenty-nine years happen in between. Children die. Marriages end. Grandchildren are born. And a deed that named three people in 1997 may name only two living people today, with nothing written down about what was supposed to happen to the third share.

That is not a hypothetical drafting quibble. It is the single most common way a Lady Bird Deed fails to do the one job it was recorded to do.

Plantation Lady Bird Deed: the short version

A deed is not a will. Florida's antilapse statute rescues a lapsed gift in a will. It does not apply to deeds.
If a named beneficiary dies first and the deed is silent, the deed has to be interpreted, and interpretation means delay and cost.
The fix is drafting, not litigation: name contingent takers and say per stirpes or to the survivors, explicitly.
Name a final taker in case everyone predeceases you, so the chain never runs out.
Review the deed after any death in the family. You keep the power to revoke; use it.
Where it records: Broward County Records, Taxes & Treasury, not the Clerk of Courts.

What Is a Plantation Lady Bird Deed?

A Lady Bird Deed is a deed you record now that takes effect only when you die. It divides your ownership into two pieces. You keep an enhanced life estate: the right to live in the property for life, plus the reserved power to sell it, mortgage it, lease it, give it away or cancel the deed outright, all without asking anyone's permission. The people you name hold a remainder interest that is worth nothing and confers nothing until the day you die.

That reserved power is what distinguishes it from a traditional life estate deed. Under an ordinary life estate, the remaindermen own a present interest the moment the deed is recorded. They must consent to a sale. Their creditors, their divorces and their bankruptcies attach to your house. Under a Lady Bird Deed none of that happens, because they own nothing you cannot take back.

When you die, the property is already theirs. No probate case, no petition, no personal representative, no waiting. They record a certified death certificate against the parcel and the chain of title is complete.

All of which works beautifully, provided the people named on the deed are still alive to receive it.

Plantation Lady Bird Deed document prepared by a Broward County estate planning attorney

When a Named Beneficiary Dies Before You Do

Start with the scenario, because it is more common in Plantation than almost anywhere else in Broward. A homeowner in her late sixties records a Lady Bird Deed naming her three children. Twenty-two years later her middle son dies of a heart attack at 58, leaving two teenage children of his own. She lives another six years.

At her death the deed says, in its entirety, that the property goes to Robert, Susan and Michael. Michael is dead. Michael has two children. What happens?

The honest answer: it depends on what the deed says, and most deeds say nothing

There are three plausible outcomes, and the deed as written supports an argument for each. Robert and Susan split the whole property. Michael's one-third passes to his two children. Or Michael's one-third has nowhere to go and falls back into his mother's estate, requiring a probate case on one-third of the house.

What actually happens next, in the real world

Nothing dramatic, at first. The family records a death certificate and thinks the matter is handled. The problem surfaces one to three years later, when they try to sell or refinance, and a title underwriter reads the deed carefully for the first time.

The underwriter's job is to insure that the seller owns what the seller claims to own. Faced with a deed that names a dead person and does not say what becomes of his share, the underwriter does not guess. It raises a title requirement: obtain a court order determining the beneficiaries, or obtain releases from every person who could conceivably claim an interest, which now includes two grandchildren who may be minors, may live out of state, or may not be speaking to their aunt and uncle.

The sale stalls. Closings do not wait for title curative work. Buyers walk.
Somebody files a proceeding. Often a petition to determine beneficiaries or a quiet title action, a court case, with lawyers, on a house that was supposed to bypass court entirely.
The cost lands on the family. The money comes out of the sale proceeds, which is to say out of the inheritance.
The relationships take the damage. Grandchildren asked to sign releases in favor of their aunt and uncle sometimes decline, and reasonably so, because nobody ever told them what their grandmother intended.

The whole sequence is triggered by the absence of about eleven words from a deed. That is the argument for having one drafted rather than downloaded.

Why Florida's Antilapse Statute Does Not Rescue a Deed

Almost everyone who has heard of this problem has also heard that Florida law fixes it automatically. That belief comes from a real statute. It is simply a statute about a different document.

Fla. Stat. § 732.603 is Florida's antilapse provision. It is a good statute and it does real work. It applies to outright devises and appointments, it protects a devisee who is a grandparent, or a descendant of a grandparent, of the testator, and where a covered devisee dies before the testator, it creates a substitute gift in that devisee's surviving descendants, who take per stirpes the property the devisee would have received. Unless a contrary intent appears in the will.

Read those words again

Devise. Devisee. Testator. Will. Every operative term in the statute belongs to the law of wills. A Lady Bird Deed is not a will, does not make a devise, and has no testator. It is a deed, governed by chapter 689 of the Florida Statutes and by the law of real property.

The companion provision for trusts, Fla. Stat. § 736.1106, does the same job for trust dispositions, which tells you something: the Legislature has addressed lapse twice, once for wills and once for trusts, and has not addressed it for deeds. Nothing in Florida's real property statutes supplies a substitute gift when a remainder beneficiary named in a deed predeceases the grantor.

What that leaves you with

Without a statute to fall back on, the question becomes one of construing the deed: what did this grantor intend by this language? Courts answer that question, and Florida courts have answered versions of it. But construing a deed is litigation, and litigation is the outcome you paid to avoid.

There is also a genuine legal complication under the surface. In an ordinary deed, a remainder that is vested passes to the remainderman's own estate if they die first, which in this scenario would push Michael's one-third into Michael's probate estate, to be distributed under his will to whoever he named, possibly a spouse rather than his children. Under an enhanced life estate deed the remainder is not conventionally vested, because the grantor can wipe it out at will. That difference is the heart of the argument, and it is not a question you want opened for the first time after your death.

The cure is not to resolve the doctrine. The cure is to make the doctrine irrelevant by saying, in the deed, exactly what you want to happen.

Sources: Fla. Stat. § 732.603 (antilapse; deceased devisee; class gifts); Fla. Stat. § 736.1106 (antilapse; future interests under the terms of a trust); Fla. Stat. ch. 689.

Plantation Estate Planning Snapshot

A stable, higher-income suburb where families stay put, which means long gaps between signing a document and needing it.

16.9% of Plantation residents are age 65+
64.3% of housing units are owner-occupied
$483,500 median value of owner-occupied housing
$92,541 median household income
30.8% of residents are foreign-born
37.2% speak a language other than English at home

A median household income of $92,541 and a median owner-occupied value of $483,500 put Plantation among Broward's more affluent established suburbs. These are not starter homes and these are not short holdings.

With 16.9% of residents aged 65 or older and nearly two-thirds of housing owner-occupied, Plantation contains a large population of long-tenure owners, people who bought decades ago, raised families in the house, and now hold an asset worth many times what they paid. That is the profile for which probate is most expensive and a recorded deed most valuable.

It is also the profile in which a deed sits recorded for twenty or thirty years while the family it describes quietly changes shape.

Demographic figures: U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, Plantation city, Florida (most recent American Community Survey five-year estimates available at publication).

Chart of the Plantation median home price trend over the past decade, used for Broward County estate planning and Plantation Lady Bird Deed research — **Plantation median home price trend (past decade)**
The longer the holding, the larger the gain your beneficiaries inherit tax-free.

SCHEDULE A CONSULTATION

The Language That Fixes It

The entire problem is solved by making one decision and writing it down. The decision is: if one of my children dies before me, does that child's share go down to their children, or across to my other children?

There is no right answer. There is only your answer, and a deed that records it.

Two ways to handle a predeceased beneficiary
	Per stirpes (down the branch)	To the survivors (across)
If one of three children dies first, leaving two kids	That child's one-third goes to their two children, one-sixth each.	The two surviving children take one-half each. The grandchildren receive nothing.
Who this usually suits	Parents who think in family lines and want each branch treated equally.	Parents whose grandchildren are already provided for, or where a branch is estranged.
Common objection	Minor grandchildren on title complicate any later sale and may require a guardian.	Grandchildren can experience it as being cut out of their grandparent's estate.
Effect on the deed's core purpose	Probate still avoided.	Probate still avoided.

The minor beneficiary wrinkle

One consequence of choosing per stirpes deserves flagging, because it catches families off guard. If the substitute takers are minors when you die, they end up on title as minor owners. A minor cannot convey real property. Selling the house then requires a court-appointed guardian of the property and court approval of the sale, a proceeding, with costs, on exactly the asset the deed was meant to move cleanly.

This is not an argument against per stirpes. It is an argument for knowing about it, and it is one of the clearest signals that a family should be looking at a revocable trust instead, where a trustee can hold and sell a minor's share without any court involvement at all.

What a properly drafted Plantation deed decides

Who takes if everyone named survives you.
What happens to a share if one beneficiary dies first, down the branch, or across to the survivors.
Whether beneficiaries take as tenants in common or with rights of survivorship among themselves.
Who takes if every named beneficiary dies before you.
Whether the deed revokes and replaces any earlier recorded deed, in express words.
That your reserved powers to sell, mortgage, lease and revoke are stated fully, not summarized.

Six decisions. A form downloaded from the internet makes none of them for you, and a form that names beneficiaries without addressing the rest is not a plan. It is a partial plan that looks finished.

If Every Named Beneficiary Dies Before You

It sounds remote until you look at the arithmetic. Someone who records a deed at 68 and lives to 96 has outlived a lot of possibilities. An only child. Two siblings named as beneficiaries. A spouse plus one child, both gone. In a community where owners routinely hold property for three decades, this is not the tail case people assume.

If it happens and the deed names nobody in the alternative, the remainder has nowhere to land. The property is treated as remaining in your estate, and your family opens a full Broward County probate case on the house, the exact expense and delay the deed was recorded to eliminate, discovered at the worst possible moment.

The fix costs one sentence

A well-drafted deed names a final taker, a backstop that catches the property if the chain runs out. In practice that is usually one of:

A wider family class: "to my then-living descendants, per stirpes," which sweeps in grandchildren and great-grandchildren automatically without your having to name people who may not be born yet.
A named sibling, niece or nephew, for owners without descendants.
A charity or religious institution, which never predeceases anyone and is the cleanest possible backstop where there is no one else.
Your revocable trust, if you have one, which lets the trust's own contingent provisions take over. This is a common and elegant answer where a trust already exists.

Notice what all four have in common: they cost nothing to include, and they only ever matter in a scenario nobody expects. That is the definition of cheap insurance.

When to Take a Recorded Deed Back Out and Look at It

The most useful habit a Plantation homeowner can adopt is treating a recorded Lady Bird Deed as a living document rather than a completed errand. You kept the power to revoke. It costs nothing to exercise while you are competent and it cannot be exercised at all afterward.

Events that should trigger a review
What happened	Why the deed may need to change
A named beneficiary died	The central problem this page describes. Do not wait to find out whether the deed handles it.
You married or remarried	Spousal homestead rights attach. A deed signed before the marriage may now be unenforceable as to the homestead.
You divorced	Florida voids certain beneficiary designations to a former spouse on dissolution, but not deeds. See the Sunrise page for why that gap matters.
A grandchild was born	If you chose per stirpes, they may now be in line. If you chose the survivors, they are not. Confirm that is still what you want.
A beneficiary became disabled	An inherited house can disqualify someone from needs-based benefits. A special needs trust may need to sit between them and the property.
A beneficiary developed creditor problems	The moment you die, their creditors reach their share. Sometimes a change of structure is warranted.
You refinanced or took a home equity loan	The mortgage follows the property to your beneficiaries. Confirm they know and can carry it.
You bought another property	The deed covers one legal description. A second property needs its own instrument.
Ten years passed with nothing happening	Read it anyway. Names change, addresses change, and you may simply have changed your mind.

Updating is done by recording a new deed that expressly revokes and replaces the earlier one. Not by crossing anything out, not by a side letter, and not by telling your children what you meant. Two recorded deeds naming different beneficiaries with no clear revocation language is a title defect, and clearing it costs many times what drafting it correctly would have.

Homestead Exemption, Save Our Homes and Spousal Rights

Recording a Lady Bird Deed does not disturb your homestead exemption or the Save Our Homes cap on annual assessment increases. You remain the owner and the resident. Nothing is transferred and nothing is reassessed.

Neither the exemption nor the cap passes to your beneficiaries. A beneficiary who moves in applies in their own name with the Broward County Property Appraiser, and the assessment resets to market value. On a Plantation home held since the 1990s, that reset can be dramatic, and beneficiaries who intend to keep the house should see the number before they inherit rather than after.

The devise restriction

Article X, Section 4 of the Florida Constitution restricts what you may do with homestead property when you are survived by a spouse or a minor child. If you are survived by a minor child, the homestead cannot be devised at all. If you are survived by a spouse and no minor child, it may be devised only to the spouse. A Lady Bird Deed is not a way around this. Deeds that ignore it produce litigation instead of a clean transfer.

There is also a sequencing point specific to married couples. If both spouses hold title as tenants by the entireties (the default for most married Florida homeowners), the property passes automatically to the survivor at the first death by operation of law. The Lady Bird Deed does its real work at the second death, and it has to be drafted with that sequence in view. A deed that assumes it operates at the first death will simply sit there doing nothing.

Married couples should also read the drafting question on this page in a particular light: your contingent beneficiary language will most likely be applied many years after the first spouse dies, by which time even more has changed. Build for that.

Medicaid and Estate Recovery

Florida recovers long-term care Medicaid costs from a deceased recipient's probate estate. That word is doing all the work. Property that passes by a properly drafted enhanced life estate deed never becomes a probate asset, so there is nothing for the state to file a claim against.

Florida also does not treat recording the deed as a disqualifying transfer for eligibility purposes, because you have not given anything away. You keep the power to sell the property and pocket the proceeds. Nothing has left your control, so nothing triggers the transfer penalty that an outright gift to a child would.

The limits and one specific to this page's subject

A defective deed is not a deed. This is the one that connects to everything above. If the deed is ambiguous enough that the property has to pass through a court proceeding to reach anyone, the state's position improves considerably. Probate avoidance is what defeats estate recovery, and a deed that fails to avoid probate fails at both jobs simultaneously.
It covers only real property. Bank accounts, brokerage accounts and vehicles without beneficiary designations still go through probate, where a claim can reach them.
It does not shield you during your life. While you are living, the property is still yours for eligibility purposes, subject to the homestead rules that apply.
Timing matters. The deed is far more useful recorded years in advance than signed during a hospital discharge conversation.

Sources: 42 U.S.C. § 1396p; Fla. Stat. §§ 409.910 and 409.9101; Art. X, § 4, Fla. Const.

Recording a Plantation Lady Bird Deed

Where it goes

Broward County is one of Florida's exceptions. Deeds are recorded by the Broward County Records, Taxes & Treasury Division at 115 South Andrews Avenue, Room 114, Fort Lauderdale, not by the Clerk of the Circuit Court, which handles recording in most Florida counties. People searching for "clerk of court deed recording" end up in the wrong building.

Execution requirements

A deed conveying an interest in Florida real property must be signed by the grantor in the presence of two subscribing witnesses and acknowledged before a notary public (Fla. Stat. §§ 689.01 and 695.03). Both witnesses must be present and both must sign. A notary can serve as one of the two if the notary genuinely witnessed the signing, but using two independent witnesses removes the argument.

Name the beneficiaries precisely

A point that matters more on this page than on most. Beneficiaries should be identified by full legal name, spelled as it appears on identification, and where helpful with a relationship descriptor: "my daughter, Susan Marie Alvarez." Twenty years on, a deed that says "my daughter Susie" is an invitation to a fight, particularly if there is a stepdaughter, a namesake, or a name changed by marriage.

Where the deed names contingent takers as a class ("my then-living descendants, per stirpes"), no individual names are needed, and the class sweeps in people not yet born. That is often the more durable choice.

Recording fees and documentary stamp tax

Recording fees in Broward County are $10.00 for the first page and $8.50 for each additional page, plus $1.00 for each name over four that must be indexed. That last item is worth a moment's thought on a deed that names primary beneficiaries, contingent beneficiaries and a final taker, the names add up, and it is still trivially cheap compared with the alternative.

Documentary stamp tax on a deed is charged at $0.70 per $100 of consideration outside Miami-Dade County. A Lady Bird Deed given for no consideration on an unencumbered homestead generally carries only minimal tax. If there is a mortgage, the outstanding balance is treated as consideration, and the tax should be calculated before the deed is signed.

Sources: Florida Department of Revenue, Technical Assistance Advisement 20B4-004 (Oct. 16, 2020); Fla. Stat. ch. 201; Fla. Stat. § 28.24(13) (statutory service charges) together with the Broward County recorder's published fee schedule; Fla. Stat. §§ 689.01, 695.03.

After a Death: What Your Family Actually Does

If the deed is drafted properly, the list is short. That is the entire product.

Order certified death certificates

From the Florida Department of Health. Order several: the property appraiser, the insurer, the bank and any lender will each want one.
Record one against the property

A certified copy is recorded in the Broward County Official Records against the folio. That filing is what makes the transfer visible in the chain of title. No petition, no court file, no personal representative.
Read the deed before doing anything else

Specific to this page: if any named beneficiary died before the owner, the family should have the deed reviewed immediately, not at the closing table two years later. Problems found early are usually fixable by agreement. Problems found at a closing are usually fixable only by a judge.
Notify the insurer

Homeowner's coverage has to be rewritten in the new owners' names. A lapse discovered after a loss cannot be undone.
Contact the lender, if there is a mortgage

The loan follows the property. Federal law generally protects a relative who inherits a home from a due-on-sale acceleration, but the lender still needs to be told who is paying.
Apply for their own homestead exemption, if applicable

A beneficiary who moves in applies with the Broward County Property Appraiser in their own name. Nothing carries over, including the Save Our Homes cap.
Provide an affidavit if a title company asks

On a later sale or refinance an underwriter may want a short affidavit confirming the deed was never revoked and identifying the surviving beneficiaries. Routine, and far less work than a probate case.

What a Plantation Lady Bird Deed Does Not Do

The honest limits
It does	It does not
Pass the home outside probate to the beneficiaries it names.	Name substitute beneficiaries on its own. You have to write them in.
Leave you free to sell, mortgage, lease or revoke without anyone's consent.	Update itself when your family changes.
Preserve your homestead exemption and Save Our Homes cap during your life.	Transfer that cap to your beneficiaries.
Give beneficiaries a stepped-up basis at your death.	Wipe out the mortgage, which follows the house.
Work alongside a will, a trust and beneficiary designations.	Cover bank accounts, brokerage accounts or vehicles.
Keep beneficiaries' creditors away from the property during your lifetime.	Keep their creditors away after your death, once it is theirs.
Handle a minor beneficiary's share as a matter of title.	Let a minor beneficiary sell. That takes a guardianship and a court order.
Be revoked or replaced at any time while you are competent.	Do anything at all if you lose capacity before signing it.

Two rows there point at the same conclusion: where minor beneficiaries are a realistic possibility, a revocable trust often handles what a deed cannot, because a trustee can sell without a guardianship and hold a young beneficiary's share until they are ready for it.

How a Plantation Lady Bird Deed Compares to the Alternatives

Options for passing a Plantation home
Option	Avoids probate?	Keeps control?	Handles a beneficiary dying first?	Main drawback
Lady Bird Deed	Yes	Yes, full power to sell or revoke	Only if drafted to	No statutory safety net; the drafting has to do the work
Will alone	No	Yes	Yes, § 732.603 supplies a substitute gift	A full Broward probate case on the house
Revocable living trust	Yes	Yes	Yes, § 736.1106, plus whatever the trust says	Higher cost; must be funded and maintained
Traditional life estate deed	Yes	No, remaindermen must consent to sell	Worse. A vested remainder can pass to the deceased remainderman's own estate.	You lose control of your own home
Outright gift to children now	Yes	No, it is theirs	No. Their share goes to their heirs, not yours.	Medicaid transfer penalty, loss of stepped-up basis, exposure to their creditors and divorces
Adding a child to the deed as joint owner	Partly	No	No	Gift tax exposure, their creditors reach your home, and you cannot undo it

Read the fourth column down the page, because it makes an uncomfortable point honestly: a will and a trust both have statutory backstops for a predeceased beneficiary, and a deed does not. That is not a reason to reject the deed: the deed is cheaper, simpler and avoids probate, which the will does not. It is a reason to insist the deed be drafted rather than downloaded, because with a deed the drafting is the safety net.

Florida, it bears repeating, has no transfer-on-death deed. Owners arriving from states that offer one are frequently surprised. The Lady Bird Deed is Florida's functional equivalent, and it exists by practice and title custom rather than by a statute of its own, which is exactly why what it says matters so much.

How to Get a Plantation Lady Bird Deed

Decide who the primary beneficiaries are

Full legal names, spelled as they appear on identification, with a relationship descriptor where it helps.
Decide what happens if one of them dies before you

Down the branch to their children, or across to the surviving beneficiaries. This is the step most do-it-yourself deeds skip entirely.
Decide what happens if all of them die before you

Name a final taker so the chain never runs out and the property never falls back into your estate.
Think about minors

If per stirpes could put a minor on title, understand what that means for a later sale, and whether a trust is the better container.
Pull the vesting deed and folio number

The legal description must come from the last recorded deed in the Broward County Official Records, exactly as written.
Draft the enhanced life estate reservation

Full reserved power to sell, convey, mortgage, lease and revoke without the consent of the remainder beneficiaries. Weak reservation language is the single most common defect in form deeds.
Sign with two witnesses and a notary

Two subscribing witnesses present at the signing, plus a notarial acknowledgment. Fla. Stat. §§ 689.01 and 695.03.
Record with Broward Records, Taxes & Treasury

115 South Andrews Avenue, Room 114, Fort Lauderdale. $10.00 first page, $8.50 each additional page, $1.00 per name over four.
Diary it for review

Tell your beneficiaries where the recorded copy is, and look at the deed again after any death, divorce, marriage or birth in the family.

Plain-English Glossary

Terms that come up when a beneficiary dies first
Term	What it means here
Enhanced life estate deed	The formal name for a Lady Bird Deed. You keep everything during your life, including the right to cancel it.
Lapse	What happens to a gift when the person who was supposed to receive it dies first.
Antilapse statute	A statute that substitutes the deceased beneficiary's descendants so the gift does not fail. Florida has one for wills and one for trusts. Not for deeds.
Devise	A gift of property made in a will. A deed does not make a devise, which is why the antilapse statute does not reach it.
Per stirpes	By the branch. A deceased beneficiary's share passes down to their own descendants rather than across to the other beneficiaries.
Remainder beneficiary	The person named in the deed to receive the property at your death. Also called a remainderman.
Contingent beneficiary	The backup. Who takes if the primary beneficiary is not there to take.
Vested remainder	A remainder interest the holder owns now, even though possession comes later. Under a Lady Bird Deed the remainder is not vested in this ordinary sense, because you can revoke it.
Tenants in common	Two or more owners each holding an undivided fractional share. What multiple beneficiaries usually receive.
Title requirement	A condition an underwriter imposes before insuring a sale. An ambiguous deed produces one.
Quiet title action	A lawsuit to resolve who actually owns property. Sometimes the only way to clear an ambiguous deed.
Stepped-up basis	Your beneficiaries' capital gains basis is the value at your death, not what you paid. Substantial on a long-held Plantation home.

Plantation Areas We Serve

We prepare Lady Bird Deeds for owners throughout Plantation and the surrounding central Broward communities, including:

Plantation Acres Plantation Isles Jacaranda Jacaranda Lakes Plantation Gardens Lauderdale West Hawaiian Gardens Sunset Strip Central Park Country Club Estates Plantation Park Bayberry Lakes Fountain Springs The Hamptons Sunrise Boulevard corridor Broward Boulevard corridor University Drive corridor Pine Island Road corridor

All Plantation property is recorded in the Broward County Official Records through the Records, Taxes & Treasury Division in Fort Lauderdale, and any probate case would be filed in the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit, Probate Division.

Work With a Plantation Lady Bird Deed Attorney

Yanitza Schoonover focuses her practice on probate administration and estate planning for Florida families. She helps Plantation owners with:

Plantation Lady Bird Deed drafting, execution and recording
Contingent and successor beneficiary language that holds up over decades
Formal and summary probate administration
Estate planning coordination for Florida homesteads

If you already have a deed recorded and someone named on it has since died, bring it in. That review is short, and it is far cheaper now than it will be at a closing table.

Schedule Your Consultation

Yanitza Schoonover

Plantation Lady Bird Deed Frequently Asked Questions

What happens if a beneficiary named in my Lady Bird Deed dies before I do?

It depends entirely on what the deed says, and most deeds prepared from online forms say nothing at all. If the deed names alternate takers, that language controls and the property goes where you directed. If it simply names three children and one predeceases you, the deed has to be interpreted, and interpretation means uncertainty at exactly the moment your family cannot afford it. A title underwriter faced with an ambiguous deed will often decline to insure until a court resolves it, producing the probate proceeding the deed was supposed to prevent.

Does Florida's antilapse statute fix this automatically?

No, and this is the misunderstanding that causes the problem. Fla. Stat. § 732.603 is an antilapse statute for wills. It applies to outright devises and appointments, protects a devisee who is a grandparent or a descendant of a grandparent of the testator, and creates a substitute gift in that devisee's surviving descendants who take per stirpes. Every word of that is about a will. A Lady Bird Deed is a deed, not a devise, and nothing in Florida's real property statutes supplies an equivalent substitute gift. If you want a predeceased child's share to pass to that child's children, the deed has to say so.

What is per stirpes and why does it belong in my deed?

Per stirpes means "by the branch." If you name three children per stirpes and one dies before you leaving two children of their own, that branch's one-third does not disappear and is not split among the surviving siblings. It passes down to the two grandchildren, who share it. The alternative is that the surviving beneficiaries divide everything, cutting out the grandchildren entirely. Neither answer is right or wrong. What is wrong is leaving the deed silent so nobody knows which one you intended.

What if all of my named beneficiaries die before me?

Then the remainder has nowhere to go, and the property is treated as remaining in your estate at death, a full Broward County probate case on the house, which is precisely what the deed was recorded to avoid. This is not far-fetched for someone who records a deed in their sixties and lives into their nineties. A well-drafted deed names a final taker in the alternative: a wider family class, a sibling, a charity, or your own revocable trust. It costs nothing to include and only ever matters in a scenario nobody expects.

How often should I review a Lady Bird Deed?

After any event that changes your family: a death, a divorce, a marriage, a birth, an estrangement, or a beneficiary developing a disability or a creditor problem. Do not treat a recorded deed as finished business. Because you keep the power to revoke, updating it is straightforward while you are competent and impossible afterward. Plantation is a long-tenure community where twenty or thirty years can pass between recording a deed and needing it, and a great deal changes in that time.

Can I just add a beneficiary later?

You do not amend a Lady Bird Deed the way you amend a trust. You record a new deed that supersedes the old one, with language making clear that it revokes and replaces the earlier instrument. Doing that correctly matters: two recorded deeds with different beneficiaries and no clear revocation language is a title problem, not a plan. It is inexpensive to do properly and expensive to fix.

What if a beneficiary is a minor when I die?

They can hold title, but they cannot convey it. Selling the property then requires a court-appointed guardian of the property and court approval of the sale, a proceeding, with costs, on the very asset the deed was meant to move cleanly. This is one of the clearest signals that a family should be looking at a revocable trust instead, where a trustee can hold and sell a minor's share with no court involvement at all.

Where do I record a Lady Bird Deed for Plantation property?

With the Broward County Records, Taxes & Treasury Division, at 115 South Andrews Avenue, Room 114, Fort Lauderdale. This surprises people because in most Florida counties the Clerk of the Circuit Court handles recording; in Broward it is a county division. Recording fees are $10.00 for the first page and $8.50 for each additional page, plus $1.00 for each name over four that has to be indexed, worth noting on a deed that names several contingent beneficiaries.

Will a Plantation Lady Bird Deed affect my homestead exemption?

No. You remain the owner for every practical and legal purpose during your lifetime, so your homestead exemption and your accumulated Save Our Homes cap both continue undisturbed. Neither transfers to your beneficiaries at your death. A beneficiary who moves in must apply for their own exemption with the Broward County Property Appraiser, and the assessment resets to market value.

Does a Plantation Lady Bird Deed protect the home from Medicaid estate recovery?

In practice it usually does, because Florida limits estate recovery to the probate estate. Property that passes by a properly drafted enhanced life estate deed is not part of the probate estate, so there is nothing for the state to recover against. Florida also does not treat the deed as a disqualifying transfer for eligibility purposes, since you keep full control during your life. Note the connection to the rest of this page: a deed ambiguous enough to require a court proceeding is a deed that has not avoided probate, and it therefore fails at both jobs at once.

Do my beneficiaries get a stepped-up basis?

Yes. Because the transfer takes effect at your death rather than during your life, your beneficiaries take the property with a basis equal to its fair market value on the date of death. On a Plantation home bought in the 1980s or 1990s and held ever since, that step-up can erase an enormous capital gain that an outright lifetime gift would have handed straight to your children.

Can a Plantation Lady Bird Deed be revoked?

Yes, and that is the whole point of the enhanced life estate. Because you reserve the power to sell, convey, mortgage, lease and revoke without anyone's consent, you can record a new deed that revokes or replaces the old one at any time while you are competent. Your named beneficiaries have no vote and no veto, and their creditors cannot reach the property, because they hold nothing until you die.

We also assist owners in nearby Broward markets including Sunrise, Davie, Fort Lauderdale, Coral Springs, Pembroke Pines, and Hollywood. Browse every market on our areas we serve page.

Florida Lady Bird Deed Attorney Serves Homeowners Across Florida

We help homeowners throughout Florida with Lady Bird Deeds and probate avoidance planning. Below are many of the primary Florida markets we serve, but we're not limited to these locations. You can also browse the full Florida Lady Bird Deed city and county directory.

• Boca Raton • Boynton Beach • Cape Coral • Clearwater • Coral Springs • Davie • Daytona Beach • Deerfield Beach • Doral • Fort Lauderdale • Hallandale Beach • Hialeah • Hollywood • Homestead • Jacksonville • Kendall • Lauderdale Lakes • Miami • Miami Beach • Miramar • Orlando • Parkland • Pembroke Pines • Pine Hills • Plantation • Pompano Beach • Port Saint Lucie • Saint Petersburg • Sunrise • Tallahassee • Tampa • West Palm Beach • Weston

Plantation Lady Bird Deed Attorney

A Plantation Lady Bird Deed keeps your home out of probate. Unless a beneficiary dies first and the deed never said what happens next.