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...
Estate Planning
Go pull your revocable trust out of the drawer. Find the paragraph that says something like “the minimum pecuniary amount necessary to reduce to zero the federal estate tax owed as a result of my death.” Or “that portion of the residue equal to the maximum amount that can pass free of federal estate tax.”...
Your will may not control what happens to your Florida home. If you have a surviving spouse or a minor child, Florida’s Constitution decides — not your documents. Most people don’t find this out until after someone dies, which is when fixing it becomes impossible. Florida’s homestead law restricts how you can leave your primary...
People used to ask me why they should hire an estate planning attorney instead of LegalZoom. Now they ask about ChatGPT. I’m not concerned. Let’s say you ask ChatGPT to draft your will. It does. It tells you how to sign in the presence of two witnesses who are also in the presence of each...
Jill Ginsberg and David Shulman discuss advance directives and a “life plan” in Florida. ...
Finally. For those who have been following, the issue of “digital assets” is a fast developing problem in the estate planning world. Putting aside for a moment who has the right to “inherit” your assets, the bigger problem with estate planning attorneys is who has access to certain assets and online accounts when you die. Take for...
This is the second of three (actually four) posts on the different types of homestead in Florida. In my previous post, I discussed descent and distribution — the rules governing how your homestead may and may not be disposed of upon your death. Today I’m writing about an incredibly important and complicated aspect of homestead:...
One of the things that’s becoming more and more frustrating for trusts and estates lawyers in Florida is the refusal of banks and other financial institutions to accept properly drafted powers of attorney. A power of attorney is a document in which a person (the principal) grants another person (the agent) the authority to act...