Lady Bird deed or revocable trust — which one for your homestead?

If you own a Florida home and you want it to skip probate when you die, you have two clean options: a Lady Bird deed or a revocable living trust holding the home. Both work. They’re not interchangeable.

The question we get on almost every planning consult: which one fits my situation?

The 30-second version

	Lady Bird deed	Revocable trust
Cost	$750 flat	$1,800 standalone
Avoids probate on the home	Yes	Yes (only if funded)
Preserves homestead exemption + Save Our Homes	Yes — cleanly	Yes — but requires careful drafting
Preserves constitutional creditor protection	Yes — cleanly	Mostly yes, but case law is evolving
Handles other assets (accounts, business, out-of-state property)	No — homestead only	Yes
Names successor trustee for minor children	No	Yes
Ongoing maintenance	None	Funding maintenance over time

For many Florida families, the answer is “both, depending on what we’re solving.”

When a Lady Bird deed is the right answer

Pick a Lady Bird deed when:

• The home is your main concern. If you have a homestead, modest financial accounts (which can be handled by POD/TOD beneficiary designations), and that’s roughly the whole estate, a Lady Bird deed plus updated beneficiary forms can avoid probate entirely.
• You want maximum simplicity. Once recorded, a Lady Bird deed needs no maintenance. No funding follow-up. No annual review. It just sits in the property records.
• You want bulletproof homestead protections. Florida’s constitutional creditor protection on the homestead transfers cleanly through a Lady Bird deed. Revocable trusts can complicate this — case law has evolved over the past decade and continues to evolve.
• You’re in your 70s+ with a stable family situation. Less time horizon, less complexity, less appetite for ongoing trust maintenance. A Lady Bird deed is the lighter touch.
• Cost matters. $750 vs $1,800. For just-the-house planning, the Lady Bird deed is materially cheaper.

When a revocable trust is the right answer

Pick a revocable trust when:

• You have minor children. A revocable trust names a successor trustee who manages assets for minor beneficiaries. Lady Bird deeds give the kid title at age 18 — usually a bad idea.
• You have multiple types of assets. Real estate plus brokerage plus a business interest plus an out-of-state property — the trust holds everything in one structure with one successor administration. Lady Bird deeds only handle the homestead.
• You want flexibility on disposition. A trust can do staggered distributions (“half at 25, half at 30”), conditional distributions (“after college”), or trustee discretion. Lady Bird deeds just transfer title outright at death.
• You want privacy. Wills become public record at probate. Trusts don’t. (The home itself is still public via property records, but the rest of the estate stays private.)
• You have out-of-state property. A Florida revocable trust can hold the Florida home AND, with parallel deeds, hold the Connecticut vacation house and the Wyoming LLC interests. Lady Bird is Florida-only.
• Family dynamics are complicated. Blended families, second marriages, special-needs heirs, expectations that need tempering — these are trust territory.

Our common compromise: both

For many of our planning clients, the cleanest answer is both:

• Lady Bird deed on the homestead — keeps homestead protections cleanly, low maintenance.
• Revocable trust for everything else — accounts, vacation home, business interests, life insurance proceeds (named as beneficiary).

Cost: ~$2,550 ($750 Lady Bird + $1,800 trust). Roughly the same as the pour-over package, but with the homestead handled by a deed rather than the trust. We do this whenever the homestead is a meaningful asset and the family has any complexity beyond the home itself.

What we don’t recommend

A revocable trust holding the homestead, with no parallel Lady Bird. Florida case law on homestead-in-trust has been unsettled. A poorly drafted homestead-in-trust can lose the constitutional creditor protection or the Save Our Homes property tax cap — both expensive to lose. We can draft this carefully when the situation calls for it, but for most clients we use the Lady Bird deed instead and avoid the question entirely.

A Lady Bird deed plus nothing else, when there are minor kids. The kids end up owning the house outright at 18. That’s a bad outcome for most families. Pair with a trust — or don’t use Lady Bird and use a trust that holds the homestead with care.

No planning at all. The home goes through probate. Even with a will. That’s $1,950–$2,950 in attorney fees and 6–10 weeks (summary) or 6–12 months (formal) for the family to wait. Way more expensive than either planning option.

The consult conversation

On a planning consult, we walk through your specific homestead, financial picture, family structure, and goals. The answer is rarely “Lady Bird vs trust” in the abstract — it’s “here’s the lightest, cleanest version of what you need.” Sometimes that’s just a Lady Bird. Sometimes it’s the full pour-over package. Sometimes it’s both.

We tell you what we’d tell a friend. If a $750 Lady Bird deed solves your situation, that’s what we recommend, even though it’s a smaller engagement for us. We’d rather be honest now than oversell now and lose your future referrals.