Read it before
you sign it.

Everything you did not hand out by name elsewhere in the will goes here — the leftovers, plus anything you left to someone who died before you. In this document the leftovers do not go to a person. They go into the trust, and the trust's rules decide the rest. If this clause is missing or badly drafted, Florida's intestacy statute decides instead of you.

This is the list of things the person in charge may do without asking a judge for permission: sell the house, keep the house, rent it, borrow against it, move the money, hire a lawyer and pay that lawyer out of your money. It is written broadly on purpose, because narrow powers mean a court petition — which costs more than the sale it authorizes. The check on that power is not this clause. It is the duty to act in the beneficiaries' interest, and the requirement to account to them.

Three words that decide who your grandchildren are to you. Per stirpes means the estate is cut into shares at the level of your children — one share each — and if a child has died, that child's share drops down and is split among that child's own children. Three children, one predeceased with two kids: two children take a third each, the two grandchildren take a sixth each. The alternative, per capita at each generation, would give all living grandchildren equal shares instead. Neither is right or wrong. But nobody should sign this without being told the difference.

The threat: challenge this and you get nothing. It is the clause clients ask for most often, and in Florida it does not work. Sections 732.517 and 736.1108 of the Florida Statutes make a penalty clause against a contesting beneficiary unenforceable in a will and in a trust. If you saw this clause in your own document and felt protected by it, you were not. What actually deters a challenge is capacity documented at signing, an independent witness, and a distribution your family has already been told about.

The switch. It says exactly when someone else may begin handling your money while you are still alive: two doctors, in writing, one of them your own. Not a phone call from a relative, not a bank's judgment, and no guardianship hearing. This is the clause that keeps a family out of court, and it is the one most often left vague. Ask who the two doctors would be. Ask what the successor has to do before the first cheque.

The will's whole job, once you have a trust, is to be a net. Anything you forgot to put into the trust while you were alive — the credit-union account from 1998, a lot in Golden Gate Estates — falls through the will and pours into the trust after you die. It works, but it works the slow way: through probate. Every asset that needs this clause is an asset that should have been retitled. The net is not the plan. It is what catches the plan's mistakes.

The ring, the clock, the boat. Florida lets you list those on a separate sheet of paper, signed and dated in your own hand, and change it whenever you like without paying anyone to redo the will. Most of the arguments we see after a death are not about money. They are about objects worth four hundred dollars. This is the cheapest clause in the document and it prevents the most damage.