The most common family argument, and the statute’s answer
A parent helps one child with a house deposit, or a business, or medical bills. The parent dies. The other children say it should come off that child’s share. The child says it was a gift.
Lawyers call that ademption by satisfaction. Florida enacted a provision for revocable trusts in 2025, and its answer is firmly on one side.
(a) The trust instrument provides for the deduction of the lifetime gift or distribution.
(b) The settlor or the trustee of the revocable trust declares in a contemporaneous writing that the gift or distribution is to be deducted from the devise or is in satisfaction of the devise.
(c) The devisee acknowledges in writing that the gift or distribution is in satisfaction of the devise.
Section 736.1110(1), Florida Statutes, listing the circumstances in which a lifetime gift is treated as a satisfaction.
All three are documentary. There is no route through evidence of what the settlor said, what the family understood, or how the gift was described at the time. If none of the three applies, the gift was a gift and the inheritance is unaffected.
Why the default runs that way
The choice is deliberate and it favours certainty over accuracy. A rule that let families litigate whether a payment twenty years ago was an advance would guarantee disputes in every estate where a parent helped one child more than another, which is most of them.
By requiring a document, the statute makes the question answerable from the file. It will occasionally produce the wrong result, where a settlor plainly meant a payment as an advance and never wrote it down. The Legislature accepted that cost.
The practical consequence for anyone who is still alive is simple. If you want a lifetime gift to count against someone’s share, write it down when you make it. The word in the statute is contemporaneous, so a memorandum produced later, when relations have soured, will not do the work.
Note who can make that declaration. It is the settlor or the trustee of the revocable trust. Where a trustee is administering the trust during the settlor’s lifetime, perhaps under an incapacity, the trustee can document a distribution as an advance.
Valuing it
For purposes of part satisfaction, property distributed or given during the settlor’s lifetime is valued at the time the devisee came into possession or enjoyment of the property or at the time of the death of the settlor, whichever occurs first.
Section 736.1110(2), Florida Statutes.
Almost always the earlier date will be when the recipient got the property, so the value is fixed at the time of the gift. Growth afterwards belongs to the recipient and is not charged against their share.
That matters most where the gift was an asset rather than cash. A house given in 2010 counts at its 2010 value, not what it is worth when the settlor dies.
A section with no case law, and why that means nothing yet
This is the newest provision in the Florida Trust Code. It was created in 2025 and applies to revocable trusts that become irrevocable on or after July 1, 2025, which for most trusts means the settlor died on or after that date.
Our review found no decision citing it. We do not present that as a finding. Elsewhere in this series a nil result is worth reporting, because it tells you a long standing provision has gone unexamined. Here the section is barely a year old and applies only prospectively, so silence is exactly what you would expect and it says nothing about how the section will be read.
What we can say is what remains open on the face of the text. How close in time a writing must be to count as contemporaneous. Whether a declaration must identify the particular devise it is set against. And how the section interacts with a trust that already contains a general equalisation clause.
If the settlor died earlier
For a revocable trust that became irrevocable before July 1, 2025, this section does not apply, and the question falls to be answered under the trust’s own terms and the general rules of construction in section 736.1101, under which the settlor’s intent as expressed in the terms of the trust controls.
That is not the same test, and it is worth being precise about which side of the date you are on before arguing about anything else.