Take the free quiz below to find out if you need an attorney for estate planning or if your situation is simple enough to handle on your own.
How the Estate Planning Quiz Works
The quiz asks about your family, what you own, and anything that has changed for you lately. Those answers add up to a score out of 100 that tells you whether a lawyer is worth it in your case.
Answer 8 Questions About Your Situation
The 8 questions cover the same ground an attorney works through in a first meeting.
- What you have already: Do you have nothing yet, or a basic will? Maybe you put a full plan together more than 3 years ago. You may also have a plan you finished in the last year or two (that needs updating).
- Your household: Single with no dependents is one option. Other options include children under 18, a blended family, and adult children. Family structure drives more of how a plan gets built than almost anything else.
- Your business: If you do not own one, pick no business. A side or freelance venture is separate from an established business you own outright. Choose the partners option if you share the company with someone.
- What you own: This is the only question where you can tick more than one box. Start with your home, your retirement and investment accounts, and your life insurance. Then work through rental or second property, out-of-state property, business interests, and crypto.
- What has changed lately: A marriage or divorce, a new child or grandchild, a death in the family, and a health diagnosis all appear as separate answers. If nothing much has happened, there is an option for that too.
- How confident you feel: How sure are you that your wishes would be followed if something happened tomorrow?
- How you like to work: Would you rather handle things yourself, use templates with occasional advice, or have someone guiding you? There is no wrong answer.
- What matters most to you: Choose between keeping costs low right now, moving fast, protecting your family long term, and building a lasting legacy.
Review Your Estate Planning Result
Your result forms once you answer the last question.
You’ll get a profile name and an Attorney Fit Score out of 100, built from 3 factors, each shown as its own percentage.
- Complexity of your estate: This covers your family structure, your business ownership, and the mix of assets that would pass to someone else.
- Urgency of acting now: This looks at whether you already have a plan, how current it is, and any life change that has just happened or is coming.
- Value of a guided approach: This reflects how much you want someone handling the details for you.
Every result belongs to one of 4 profiles.
| Profile | Who it fits |
| The Confident Self-Starter | You have a simple estate, nobody depending on you financially, and a preference for handling things yourself. |
| The Foundation Builder | You have a growing family or a meaningful set of assets, without the complexity of a business or a blended estate. |
| The Plan That Needs a Tune-Up | You already have documents, though time or a life change may have left gaps in them. |
| The Legacy Strategist | You have business interests, a blended family, or property in more than one state. |
The result page also gives you 6 questions worth asking any attorney you speak with.
Everything you see there is an educational estimate rather than legal advice, so reading your result does not create an attorney-client relationship.
Schedule a Free Call with AJ Yolofsky to Confirm Your Next Step
Still not sure whether you need an attorney after seeing your score? A short call is the easiest way to talk through your situation and work out where to go next.
AJ Yolofsky is the founder of Yolofsky Law and the attorney you would work with. He has practiced law in Florida since 2004.
Your result page lets you book a 15-minute intro call with him. You talk through your situation and get an honest answer on whether a plan makes sense for you yet. There is no obligation attached to the call.
If it does make sense to continue, a full consultation follows. AJ reviews your family structure, your assets, and your goals, then sends you a plain-English summary of the plan before any drafting starts.
You can schedule a call directly, or reach our Fort Lauderdale office at 954-466-5756.
Estate Planning Attorney vs. DIY Estate Planning
Florida law lets you write your own will without a lawyer, so a DIY platform is a real option for some people. An attorney is required to work on the document.
The 3 things a DIY platform leaves to you:
- Moving your assets into your trust: A trust only controls what has legally been retitled into it. Your house, your brokerage account, and your share of a business each need that step after you sign. An attorney does it as part of the work.
- Checking your beneficiary forms: When you opened your 401(k) or took life insurance, you named someone on a form to receive the money when you die. The company pays whoever is on that form. Your will cannot override it. So if you named your mother in 2005, then married and wrote a will leaving everything to your wife, your mother still gets the 401(k). An attorney goes through those forms and updates them to match the rest of your plan.
- Applying Florida-specific rules: Templates are written to work in any state, so they miss things like the homestead restrictions that apply to your home here. An attorney builds around them from the start.
Yolofsky Law covers all 3 of those steps as part of one engagement, from drafting the documents through to funding your trust. We quote our estate planning work as a flat fee agreed before anything begins.
Situations That Might Require an Estate Planning Attorney
Your family setup decides how complex your plan needs to be. A person with a $400,000 home and 2 children from a first marriage has a bigger planning problem than someone with $2 million and no dependents.
The 5 situations below are the ones that most often need an attorney:
1. You Have a Blended Family or Children From Another Relationship
If you die without a will in Florida, the state decides who inherits what. Under section 732.102, your spouse takes the whole estate when all of your children are also your spouse’s children.
If even one of your children is from an earlier relationship, your spouse takes half, and your children divide the other half. The same half-and-half split applies when your spouse has children from an earlier relationship, even if all of yours are shared.
Second marriages often have these issues. No plan, or a plan written before the second marriage, can leave your current spouse and your children from a first marriage co-owning the same assets.
That is a large part of why estate planning is important once a household stops being straightforward.
2. You Have Children Under 18
Having a child under 18 changes 2 things about your plan.
The first one is your house.
Florida calls your primary home your homestead. It carries protections that override whatever your will says.
- Section 732.4015 stops you from leaving the homestead to anyone other than your spouse while you have a minor child. Naming someone else in your will does not get around it.
- Section 732.401 sets out who gets the home when your will doesn’t specify. Your spouse gets to live there for the rest of their life. Your children own it after that. Your spouse can choose to take half of it outright instead, with your children taking the other half.
The second thing is guardianship. Your will is where you name the person you want raising your children if you and their other parent are both gone. The court still makes the final decision if you don’t name a valid guardian.
3. You Own a Business or a Share of One
Your ownership interest does not pass to your family the way a bank account does. Under section 605.0602 of the Florida Revised Limited Liability Company Act, a member is dissociated from the LLC at death.
Your family still receives your share of the profits. But they get no vote and no say in how the business is run, unless your operating agreement says otherwise.
Your operating agreement and any buy-sell agreement decide that outcome, so both need to match your estate plan.
Handing a business over takes time to set up. The Exit Planning Institute reports that only 20% to 30% of businesses that go to market end up selling, so business succession work usually starts years before an exit.
Owners often raise asset protection in the same conversation. Those strategies carry timing rules and transfer restrictions of their own, so they work best when set up long before any claim exists.
4. You Own Property in More Than One State
Real estate follows the law of the state it sits in. A Florida will does not clear title to a condo in North Carolina by itself, so your family can face a second probate case there.
Lawyers call that second case ancillary probate. A properly funded trust avoids it in most cases.
5. Someone in Your Family Depends on Government Benefits
If someone in your family relies on Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Medicaid, leaving them money in your will can cost them those benefits.
These programs only pay people who own very little. The exact limits differ from one program to the next. So if you leave your disabled sister $50,000, that money can count as hers and stop her payments until she has spent it.
A special needs trust can be built for this. The money is held for her rather than handed to her, so it is not counted as something she owns. She can still use it for things her benefits do not cover, like dental work or a specialist wheelchair.
How well that works comes down to how the trust is written and managed. The rules are strict. A mistake causes the problem you were trying to prevent, which is why this one needs an attorney.
How to Find a Good Estate Planning Attorney
You can do most of the checking before you ever speak to anyone:
- Confirm the license: The Florida Bar’s member directory shows every licensed attorney’s admission year, current standing, and public discipline history. Search the name before you book anything.
- Look past the titles: In Florida, only board-certified lawyers may call themselves specialists in an area of law. Other initials after a name come from private organizations, so ask what earning that credential involved.
- Ask how they charge: Hourly billing makes the total hard to predict before you start. A flat fee quoted upfront tells you what the whole engagement costs.
- Find out who does the drafting: Some operations run on templates completed by non-lawyers. You want to know that an attorney is reading your documents.
- Ask what happens after signing: Plans go stale as families, assets, and tax laws change. Check whether reviews are part of the relationship or billed each time separately.
- Match the firm to your situation: If you own a company, you want an estate planning attorney in Florida who works on operating agreements and succession as well as wills.
What Questions to Ask an Estate Planning Attorney
Bring these to every firm you speak with. The answers tell you how a firm works.
- “What do you need to know about my family before you draft anything?” A thorough process starts with your household, your assets, and what you want to happen. Use the answer to judge how much of that groundwork the firm does for you.
- “Will you move my assets into the trust, or is that left to me?” Funding is the step most plans fail on, so you want a clear answer on who does the retitling.
- “What does your fee include?” Check whether the quote covers the signing meeting, the funding work, and follow-up questions later on.
- “What happens after I sign?” Find out whether reviews are scheduled, what triggers one, and whether they cost extra.
- “Who else at the firm can I reach if you are unavailable?” Estate questions come up at bad moments, like a hospital stay or a death in the family. You want someone who can answer the phone when your attorney is away.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Below are the questions people ask most before deciding whether to hire an estate planning attorney in Florida:
What Does an Estate Planning Attorney Do?
An estate planning attorney drafts and coordinates the documents that decide what happens to your money, your property, and your children if you die or lose the ability to make decisions.
That usually means a will, a trust, a durable power of attorney, and a healthcare directive. The attorney also makes sure your assets are titled so those documents work.
Does This Quiz Replace a Consultation with an Estate Planning Attorney?
No. The quiz is an educational estimate based on 8 answers, so it cannot see your full circumstances or the laws that apply where you live.
Reading your result does not create an attorney-client relationship either.
What Happens to My Assets in Florida If I Die Without a Will?
Florida’s intestacy law decides for you. Your spouse inherits everything if all your children are also theirs.
If any child is from another relationship, your spouse takes half, and your descendants divide the other half.
What Does Yolofsky Law Do After I Schedule a Call?
You start with a 15-minute intro call to talk through your situation and see whether the firm is a fit. If it makes sense to continue, AJ Yolofsky reviews your family structure, assets, and goals in a full consultation.
You then get a plain-English summary of the plan before any drafting begins.
How Much Does an Estate Planning Lawyer Charge?
What an estate planning attorney costs depends on what your plan includes, so a basic will and a trust-based plan sit far apart on price.
Yolofsky Law quotes a flat fee before any work starts. The firm’s estate planning cost calculator gives you a starting estimate.
Does Having a Business Change What Kind of Estate Plan I Need?
Yes. Your operating agreement and any buy-sell agreement control what happens to your share, so they have to match your will or trust.
Estate planning for business owners coordinates those documents so your family is not left with income from the company but no say in running it.
Conclusion
Whether you need an attorney for estate planning comes down to your family, what you own, and how much has changed lately.
The quiz above answers that in about 2 minutes. From there, a 15-minute intro call with AJ Yolofsky gives you a straight read on whether a plan makes sense for you yet.
Take the QuizDisclaimer: This quiz and page are provided for general educational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice; the Attorney Fit Score, profiles, and estimates are educational tools, not a substitute for advice from a licensed attorney, and using the quiz, viewing your result, or contacting the firm does not create an attorney-client relationship (formed only by a signed engagement agreement). Estate planning laws vary by state and change over time, so any statutes referenced (including Florida Statutes) are current as of publication but may have since changed, and how they apply depends on your individual circumstances-do not act or refrain from acting based on this content without consulting a qualified attorney licensed in your jurisdiction. Yolofsky Law is licensed in Florida; matters involving other states may require counsel admitted there. This material may be considered attorney advertising, and prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.