Most people who own a business in Volusia or Flagler County do not have a will. I would put it at somewhere just over half, based on forty years of asking the question across a conference table. Of the ones who do have a will, a smaller share have a trust, and a smaller share still own businesses with a partner and have actually signed a buy-sell agreement. The number who have all three documents in place and up to date is depressingly small.
There are reasons. Estate planning is grim by nature. You have to sit down and think about your death, which nobody wants to do at forty-three, especially not when there is a roofing crew showing up at seven and payroll runs tomorrow. So you push it off. And then a year goes by, and another, and you are fifty-two now, and your accountant has asked you about your will twice and you still have not done anything about it.
The point of this article is to talk you into doing something about it before something forces the issue.
Why Owning A Business Changes The Calculation
If you work for somebody else and you die without a will, Florida intestacy law kicks in. Your spouse gets some, your kids get some, the formula is not what most people would design themselves but it is at least predictable. The estate goes through probate. The house gets retitled. Life goes on for the people you left behind, eventually.
When you own a business, none of that is true.
A business is not like a checking account. Customers call on Monday morning expecting somebody to pick up the phone, employees come in expecting to get paid, the bank discovers it had a personal guarantee from somebody who is now deceased, and the suppliers who were carrying you on a thirty-day net suddenly want to settle their accounts. None of that pauses for the nine to twelve months a Florida probate takes.
Which is why I will tell you straight: if you own a business in Florida and you do not have an estate plan that addresses the business specifically, you are not just being disorganized. You are creating a real and foreseeable mess for the people who will have to clean up after you.
Start With A Will. It Is Not Optional.
A Florida will is the foundation. Nothing else stacks on top of it correctly without one. It names who gets what, who is in charge of administering your estate, and who looks after your minor children if you have any.
And if you are doing your will on a forty-nine-dollar legal forms website, please reconsider. I have probated wills people did themselves online and watched them blow up over things the website did not warn them about. Florida has its own witness rules, the self-proving affidavit has to be done a particular way, and holographic wills, which are valid in a handful of other states, are not valid here at all. Whatever you save in legal fees on the front end almost always costs your family ten times over on the back end.
There are also people who will tell you a trust replaces the need for a will. They are wrong. Even with a fully funded revocable trust you still want what is called a pour-over will to catch anything that did not get retitled into the trust during your lifetime. There is always something – the car you bought last spring, a dividend check from a stock you forgot you owned, the inheritance from an aunt that came in the year after you signed everything. Without a pour-over will, those assets fall back into intestacy and the trust plan you paid for ends up partially defeating itself.
What A Trust Actually Does
A revocable living trust is a separate legal entity you create during your lifetime and transfer assets into. While you are alive and well, you control it just like you control your own accounts. After you die, the trust passes assets directly to the beneficiaries you named, without going through Florida probate court.
That last part is the reason most people in Daytona Beach end up with one. Florida probate is not the disaster it is in some other states, but it is not fast either. A simple probate in Volusia County will take six to twelve months from filing to closing, and a complicated one can run two or three years. During that whole time, the probate assets are essentially frozen for transfer purposes, and any business interests sitting in probate sit in a strange limbo where nobody quite has authority to make decisions.
Trust assets, on the other hand, transfer at death without going through any of that. The successor trustee takes over right away, starts paying creditors and dealing with the business operation, and your estate attorney handles whatever cleanup probate work is left over from assets that did not make it into the trust during your lifetime.
There are other reasons for a trust beyond avoiding probate. Privacy is the one I hear about most – probate is a matter of public record in Florida, and trust administration generally is not, which matters more to some clients than to others. Revocable trusts do not provide much asset protection during your lifetime, so do not let anyone sell you one on that basis. For business owners specifically, the biggest reason is continuity of operations after the death of the owner.
The Buy-Sell Agreement Nobody Wants To Sign
If you own a business with one or more partners, this is the document I would consider least optional. The number of co-owned businesses in Volusia and Flagler Counties that are operating without a current buy-sell agreement is, in my professional opinion, alarming.
A buy-sell agreement is a contract between the owners of a business that says what happens when one of them leaves. The leaving can be voluntary, like retirement, or involuntary, like death, disability, divorce, or one partner deciding they want out and the others not being ready to lose them. The document sets out who has the right to buy the departing owner’s share, at what price, on what terms, and where the money is going to come from. Most often, for the death scenario, the money comes from life insurance.
Most owners I have worked with put off signing one of these because the conversation around the table is uncomfortable. You have to look across at your business partner of fifteen years and say, what happens if you die. Or what happens if I die. Or what happens if your wife divorces you and the court orders your shares to be split. Nobody wants to sit in that conversation. So everybody walks out of the meeting agreeing that we should really get to that one of these months.
And then six years go by. One of the partners has a stroke at fifty-eight and his spouse, who has never been involved in the day-to-day, now technically owns half of the business. Or one of them gets divorced and an ex-wife who was promised half the marital assets is suddenly a co-owner of the business that the remaining partner has been running with him for two decades. Neither of those is a hypothetical. I have lived through versions of both with clients, and they always go worse without a buy-sell in place.
A properly drafted buy-sell agreement is one of the highest-leverage legal documents you will ever pay for relative to its cost. It also has to be reviewed periodically because the agreed-upon valuation method, the funding mechanism, the trigger events, and the tax treatment can all drift out of date. A buy-sell signed in 2014 with a fixed-dollar valuation is probably wildly wrong in 2026. Pull yours out of the drawer and have one of the local Daytona attorneys who does this work routinely take a look.
About The Life Insurance Conversation
Most buy-sell agreements are funded by life insurance on the lives of the owners. The business or the other owners hold policies that pay out at death, and the proceeds are what gets used to buy the deceased owner’s share from the estate.
The mechanics are the part most owners underestimate. Who actually owns the policy, who pays the premiums, who is named as beneficiary, and how the proceeds are received all affect the tax treatment of the buyout. Done one way, the surviving owners get a stepped-up basis in the purchased shares. Done the wrong way, they do not, and a future sale of the business triggers a much bigger tax bill than it had to. If you have a buy-sell that was put together by somebody who did not coordinate with your accountant and your insurance professional, there is a meaningful chance the mechanics are not where they ought to be. Have a Palm Coast or Daytona Beach attorney who does this work for a living take a look at the structure.
Before You Turn Fifty
I picked fifty because most of the avoidable disasters I have seen in this practice involved business owners in their fifties or sixties who had been meaning to get around to this since their forties. Time runs a little differently than you think when you are running a business. The kids you were going to set up trusts for finish growing up. The business that was worth maybe two hundred thousand dollars when you should have signed a buy-sell is suddenly worth two million. And the partner you trusted completely has, somewhere in there, started going through a divorce that you did not see coming.
Getting these documents done in your forties means having them in place during the decade where most of the things that derail businesses tend to happen. The estate plan you draft at forty-three can be amended as your life changes, and most clients do amend, two or three times before they really need it. The one you have not drafted by fifty-eight is something you are racing the clock on.
The cost of all this is also not what people imagine. A solid will, a basic revocable trust, durable powers of attorney, and a healthcare surrogate designation for a married business owner in Florida is typically a flat fee that lands in the low thousands at a firm that does this work routinely. The buy-sell is more involved and depends on the business, but it is a one-time legal cost that most owners would happily pay ten times to undo a bad outcome later.
How Rice Law Firm Can Help
Estate planning and small business law are two of the areas where Rice Law has been doing the most steady work for the longest time. We draft and update wills, revocable and irrevocable trusts, durable powers of attorney, healthcare directives, entity formations, operating agreements, buy-sell agreements, succession plans, and the periodic review of any of the above when something in your life changes.
Our clients come from across Daytona Beach, Ormond Beach, Port Orange, New Smyrna Beach, Palm Coast, DeLand, and the rest of Volusia and Flagler Counties. If you are looking for Palm Coast attorneys or Daytona Beach attorneys who handle this work as part of an established estate planning and business practice rather than as a sideline, that is what we do. The first consultation is confidential. If you do not have any of these documents in place yet, we will talk through what your situation actually calls for – sometimes less than people fear and sometimes more than they were hoping. If you have documents that were drafted a long time ago, we will look them over and tell you whether they still fit the life you are living now.
Give us a call. The hardest part is making the appointment.