Pompano Beach Estate Planning

Pompano Beach Estate Planning and Probate Attorney

I grew up in Pompano Beach.

I am a Pompano Beach native. I have watched this city change for my whole life, from the fishing town it was to the one going up along the beach now. So when a family here sits down with me to talk about the house their parents bought decades ago, I am not learning the neighborhood from a map.

Homes that have been in the family a long time

Pompano has a lot of what I think of as long held property. A house bought in the sixties or seventies, paid off, lived in for forty years, and then passed down. Those homes carry the most family history and, very often, the messiest paperwork.

Here is what turns up. A deed still lists a spouse who passed away twenty years ago. Three siblings each own a piece of a house that only one of them has lived in for the last decade. Somebody added an adult child to the deed years ago to make things easier, and it quietly created a tax problem nobody saw coming.

Each of these is fixable. They are much easier to fix while everyone is still here to sign, which is the entire argument for not waiting.

Why the old house is worth more than the family thinks

Property values along this stretch of coast have moved enormously. A modest house bought for very little in the seventies can be worth many multiples of that today. Two things follow from that.

• The estate may now be large enough that how you pass the home matters for taxes, not just for feelings.
• The number is big enough to bring out disagreements among heirs that everyone assumed would never happen in their family.

I have seen so many good families fall apart over a house. Almost always it is because nothing was written down, and everyone remembered the conversation differently. A clear plan is not a cold document. It is a gift to the people you love.

Where a Pompano Beach probate case goes

Pompano Beach is in Broward County, so the case is filed with the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit in Fort Lauderdale. We handle the filing and the court communication, and in most cases you never need to appear.