What Should You Never Put in a Will?

Most people spend more time thinking about what to put in a will than what to leave out. That’s understandable—you’re focused on the people you love and what you want them to have. But a will is a legal document within estate planning that has hard boundaries, and some of the most common mistakes Floridians make aren’t about forgetting someone. They’re about including things a will was never designed to handle.

If you’re working through your estate plan in Lake Mary or anywhere in Seminole County, here’s what you need to know before you sign anything.

Your Will Can’t Control Everything You Own

This is the one that surprises people most, and it’s worth leading with it.

Certain assets you own will never pass through your will—no matter how clearly you spell it out. Retirement accounts like IRAs and 401(k)s transfer directly to whoever is named on the account’s beneficiary designation. Life insurance proceeds do the same. If your will says one thing and your beneficiary designation says another, the designation wins. The will doesn’t get a vote.

The same principle applies to property held jointly with right of survivorship—common in Florida marriages where spouses hold their home as tenants by the entirety—and to any assets you’ve already transferred into a living trust. Those assets are governed by the trust document, not your will.

This matters because people update their wills and forget to update everything else. You might spend an hour with your attorney carefully revising who gets what, and still have an ex-spouse listed as beneficiary on a life insurance policy from fifteen years ago. A good estate plan looks at the whole picture, not just the will.

Funeral Instructions Belong Somewhere Else

It’s one of the most human impulses in estate planning: you want your family to know what kind of service you’d want, whether you prefer burial or cremation, maybe even what music to play.

The problem is timing. Wills are often not located—let alone read—until days or weeks after death. In Florida, the personal representative named in your will typically isn’t formally appointed until probate has been opened at the Seminole County Courthouse. By that point, your family has almost certainly already made the arrangements.

Funeral instructions written into a will have a way of becoming a painful discovery after the fact rather than useful guidance in the moment. If these details matter to you, put them in a separate letter kept somewhere your family can find immediately—or better yet, have the conversation directly with the people who will need to act on it.

Conditions That Florida Courts Won’t Enforce

You can attach conditions to a bequest. People do it all the time—a gift that vests when a grandchild turns 25, or an inheritance tied to completing a degree. Done carefully, these provisions can work.

But certain conditions are void under Florida law regardless of how clearly they’re written. A provision that encourages divorce, requires a beneficiary to abandon their religion, or completely prohibits marriage falls into this category. These types of conditions are considered against public policy, and a Florida court will simply strike them out—or in some cases, invalidate the bequest entirely.

Incentive provisions that seem reasonable on the surface can also cause problems if they’re vague. “My son inherits when he gets his life together” is not an enforceable standard. Ambiguity like that doesn’t get resolved in your favor after you’re gone—it gets resolved in litigation, which takes time, money, and a toll on the family relationships you were probably trying to protect.

Property You No Longer Own—or Never Fully Owned

You can only give away what’s actually yours at the time of your death. This creates two common traps.

The first is bequeathing property you’ve already transferred, sold, or encumbered. If you put your Lake Mary home into a revocable living trust two years ago and your will still references it as an asset, the will’s instruction is simply ineffective. The trust controls that property now.

The second is overlooking co-ownership agreements. If you have a business partner, there may be a buy-sell agreement already governing what happens to your share when you die. Your will cannot override a valid contract. The agreement takes precedence.

Florida Statute § 732.502 governs what makes a will valid in Florida—but a technically valid will can still contain provisions that are legally ineffective. Validity of the document and enforceability of its contents are two different things.

Pet Care Instructions

Lake Mary is a community of pet owners. If you’ve ever walked the Greenway Trail on a Saturday morning, you know this. And it makes sense that people want to include their animals in their estate plans.

Here’s the limitation: under Florida law, pets are legally classified as property. Your will can transfer ownership of your dog or cat to a specific person, but it cannot legally obligate that person to care for the animal in any particular way. Once the pet is theirs, it’s theirs—your instructions about food, vet care, or living arrangements have no legal force.

The right tool for this is a pet trust. Florida Statute § 736.0408 specifically authorizes trusts for the ongoing care of animals in Florida. A properly structured pet trust names a caregiver, sets aside funds dedicated to your pet’s care, and can include as much detail as you want about how that animal should be looked after. It’s one of several situations where a trust can accomplish something a will simply cannot.

The Witness Problem

Florida law is specific about who can witness a will. Under Florida Statute § 732.504, witnesses must be competent adults—and if a witness is also named as a beneficiary in the will, it creates complications that can threaten the validity of that person’s bequest.

This is worth mentioning not because people intentionally name their witnesses as beneficiaries, but because it happens. A neighbor helps out at the signing, and that same neighbor is mentioned in the will. It’s an easy mistake to make, and it’s exactly the kind of thing an attorney catches before there’s a problem.

Passwords and Digital Account Information

Some people think putting login credentials in their will is a practical way to help their family access accounts after death. It isn’t—and it creates a real security risk.

Once a will enters probate at the Seminole County Courthouse, it becomes a public record. Anyone can request a copy. Listing passwords, PINs, or account numbers in a will is effectively making that information available to the public.

Florida’s Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, codified at Florida Statute § 740, provides a legal framework for how personal representatives and trustees can access digital accounts after death. But that framework works best when paired with proper authorization language in your estate planning documents—not a password list buried in a public court filing. Keep sensitive credentials in a secure, private document that your personal representative knows how to find.

A Will Is One Piece of a Larger Plan

The question of what not to put in a will is really a question about what your will is for. It’s a powerful document—but it has a defined role within a broader estate plan that includes beneficiary designations, trusts, powers of attorney, and advance directives.

When those pieces are coordinated and current, a will does exactly what it’s supposed to do. When they’re working against each other, even a perfectly drafted will can create confusion, delay, and conflict for the people you were trying to protect.