The hearing is maybe one percent of the case.
People think a guardianship ends when the judge signs the order. That’s when it starts. The appointment is the entry point into a court-supervised fiduciary relationship that continues, in most of our cases, until the ward dies. Every year there is a plan to file. Every year there is an accounting to reconcile. Every significant decision — selling the house, moving the ward to a facility, settling a claim — requires a court order before it can happen.
Most family members who sign up to be guardian do not understand this when they do it.
Letters of Guardianship Come First
Nothing happens until the clerk issues Letters of Guardianship. The Letters are the document the guardian shows to banks, hospitals, nursing homes, and anyone else who needs to confirm the guardian has legal authority over the ward. The order alone doesn’t do it. The Letters do.
The guardian then has 60 days to file the Initial Inventory. That is every asset the ward owns as of the date of appointment, with values: bank accounts, real estate, vehicles, life insurance, brokerage accounts, tangible personal property. All of it.
The tracking-down part is harder than people think. The ward usually can’t tell you where the accounts are. Families think they know and are wrong. I have had cases where we found out about an account eight months into the guardianship because a 1099 showed up in the mail at the ward’s old address. You don’t know what you don’t know until a tax document arrives.
Then the Plan and the Accounting
An Initial Plan is due within 60 days for a Guardian of the Property, 60 days for the Person. It tells the court how the guardian intends to handle the ward’s medical care, living arrangements, and finances for the coming year. Then every year after that, the guardian files an updated Plan and an Annual Accounting.
The Annual Accounting is not a summary. It is line-by-line — every dollar in, every dollar out, reconciled to bank statements, with the statements attached. The court auditor reviews it. If it doesn’t balance, the guardian gets an objection and has to fix it. If a transaction doesn’t have documentation, the guardian has to produce it. Judges actually read these. It is not a formality.
What Needs Court Approval
A guardian cannot sell real estate, settle a lawsuit on behalf of the ward, make gifts, change beneficiary designations, or move significant funds without a court order. The process is a petition, a notice to interested persons, and a hearing. Then the court decides.
The rules for medical decisions depend on whether the appointment is of the Person, the Property, or both. A Guardian of the Person handles medical and placement decisions within the scope of the letters, but some decisions — DNR orders, certain surgeries, placement in a locked dementia unit — require specific statutory authority or a separate court order under § 744.3215. A guardian who moves a ward to a locked facility without that authority has a problem.
Personal Liability Is Real
Most family guardians don’t think of themselves as fiduciaries. They think they are helping Mom. They are. They are also personally liable if they get it wrong.
If the guardian mishandles the ward’s money — even innocently, because they didn’t understand the rules — the guardian can be surcharged. That means the guardian personally owes the estate the money back. I have seen guardians who commingled funds with their own, or paid themselves compensation without court approval, end up owing thousands of dollars when the accounting was audited. The “I didn’t know” defense does not work in a surcharge hearing.
This is why Florida requires a Guardian of the Property to be represented by counsel. The statute, § 744.108 and § 744.3678, builds the lawyer into the system because the rules are not intuitive. What seems reasonable to a daughter taking care of her mother — paying herself for her time, using the ward’s car for her own errands, transferring money to make bill-paying easier — is not necessarily what the statute allows.
How Long It Lasts
There is no typical duration. A guardianship ends when the ward dies, when the court restores the ward’s rights, or when a minor ages out at 18. Most adult guardianships in our practice are dementia cases or developmental disability cases. Those do not end. They continue year after year — annual plan, annual accounting, periodic petitions for major decisions — until the ward passes away, and then the guardianship transitions into a probate.
The Part That Gets Missed
Somewhere in the paperwork and the hearings and the auditor’s objections is an actual person. The ward is someone’s parent, spouse, or adult child with a developmental disability. Every decision the guardian makes — where the ward lives, who provides care, whether the ward keeps the dog — is a real decision about a real life, made under court supervision, answerable to a judge.
That is what a guardianship is. Not a hearing. A system, with deadlines and audits and real consequences for getting it wrong, that lasts as long as the ward does.