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...
Estate Planning
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...
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...