A safe full of gold turns a simple Florida estate into a formal one before the personal representative even gets back to the car. The shortcut disappears, the duties multiply, and the family dynamics get worse because the ring money is now real money. In this Ask Jill episode, Jill R. Ginsberg and David A....
Estate Planning
Parent dies. Life insurance pays out. The kids are named as beneficiaries. Nobody can touch the money. Not the surviving parent, not the grandparent raising the kids. In Florida, a minor cannot legally receive and control money outright, and most families don’t see this coming until they’re already standing in the courthouse. In this week’s...
When a client walks into my office wanting to start a foundation, the first question I have to answer is whether they want a private foundation or a donor advised fund. From the outside the two structures look almost identical. The tax mechanics and operating rules underneath are not, and most of the time the...
Most Florida lawyers tell clients you can’t disinherit a spouse or minor child from the homestead. That is true, except for the part where it isn’t. The Florida Constitution restricts how you devise the homestead at death. It does not restrict how you hold title during life. Title beats devise every time, and we see...
A client forwarded me an article last week. Same client who forwards me an article every couple of months. The article was real. The estate tax it described was real. It just doesn’t apply to anyone who lives in Florida. There is no Florida estate tax. There hasn’t been one in over twenty years. Florida’s...
Florida emergency temporary guardianship lasts 90 days and does not become permanent. Here is what families get wrong about ETGs under §744.3031....
Your IRA, 401(k), and life insurance go where the beneficiary form says, not where your will says. Here's what that means in Florida....
Your will doesn’t control your house. Not in Florida, not if you have a spouse or a minor child. There are three different things in Florida called “homestead” and almost everyone confuses them: the property tax exemption, creditor protection, and the devise and descent restriction. This post is only about the third one. It’s in...