Look at the deed before you read the will. For a Florida homestead, the deed usually answers the question the will was trying to. This illustrated video follows one family through the possibilities. It is a fictional family, and the narration is synthetic, but the rules are real. It starts with how the house is...
Estate Planning
A will that leaves the Florida homestead to the wrong person is not rewritten by the court. It is disregarded, and section 732.401 of the Florida Statutes supplies the ending instead: a surviving spouse who can live in the house but cannot sell it, and children who own it but cannot use it. This video...
Most people assume the will decides who gets the house. In Florida, if you leave a spouse or a child under 18, it usually doesn’t. That is the whole point of this video. It is animated, it runs about five minutes, and it follows one house through four family situations: married with grown children, married...
You walked out of the courthouse with letters of guardianship signed by a judge. The bank told you they won’t honor them. This happens constantly, and the fix is not a better phone number. In this episode, my partner Jill Ginsberg walks through what happens when financial institutions stonewall a guardian, personal representative, or agent...
It used to be easy. When a client died, their personal representative went to the house, opened the file cabinet or the kitchen drawer, and found the statements. Bank accounts, brokerage accounts, life insurance, the timeshare, the credit cards. If something wasn’t in the drawer, it showed up in the mail over the next three...
A widow with the death certificate, the letters of administration, and the will still got told by Apple she needed a court order to access her late husband’s photos. Thirty years of family pictures behind a login. That is where most families are right now, and almost nobody sees it coming. In this video, Jill...
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....
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...