Florida Guardianship was on the minds of many as the Sarasota Herald  has just put out a rather troubling piece. EntitledElder Guardianship:  A well-oiled machine the report outlines how Florida is pretty good at getting you a guardian and not so good at ensuring you are actually guarded. The report broke my heart as so much of it was spot on as you will soon see.

A recent Florida law proposed would ban all foreign law from being used in   Florida, aimed at eliminating the potential for Sharia law taking over Florida (Ill let you be the judge if that was a real concern?) may also invalidate your wills that rely on Jewish or other religious law! Luckily you can also plan your estate in accordance with religious law without relying on it, read more to learn how. 

Ambrose Bierce is credited with once saying,  “Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.” Well, unfortunately Ambrose was right, especially in Palm Beach where probate litigation can get very heated over Grandma’s inheritance or Uncle Bob’s Jaguar. Estate planning though can prevent World War 3 and you owe it to your family to keep them intact after you are gone right? Here are my ten tips to prove Ambrose wrong!

Seriously, this has to be the third or fourth strange inheritane story to involve an Australian man but here goes. An Indonesian woman is accused of hiring a murdered to kill her Australian husband and now she claims to be part of a different religion to keep her inheritance. How does what religion she is matter from the point of view of her inheritance? Does the wife of a man who hired a hitman still get an inheritance after her husbands murder?

I have blogged about Florida’s slayer statute that addresses the rights of a beneficiary when they take the life of a testator or decedent. The cases are sometime striking when you see the rights that a person who murders someone still has in the probate court. A recent case out of Western Australia concerns a son who killed his father, then upon the death of his mother is demanding a lion’s share of the inheritance. 

In order to be a personal representative often a Court will require an   individual to put up a bond if the person cannot put up the bond they will require leave of court to determine an alternative means of security. In a 2015 case out of Ohio Corsaro v. Weston Hurd resulted from the breakdown of what happened when a bond could not be posted. Importantly it notes the importance of keeping up with your will contests and other claims in Florida Probate Courts.

Employee benefit accounts such as IRA’s, Roth IRA’s and 401(k)s are   extremely common and do not pass the same way as other property often dubbed probate property pass. These types of accounts are not only governed by probate law but also sometimes by federal law, such as the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). So what happens when your husband dies with a huge retirement account? This was an issue in a January 27, 2015 case out of Michigan.

You can do almost anything online, shop, pay bills, read a book, take a   digital tour and in Florida you can even file a law suit online – in fact in some counties such as Miami-Dade the only way to file such a suit is online. One of the most dragging areas of developed has been an online probate systemand now all but eight counties in Florida have submitted plans to develop an online probate clerk system. Probate filing systems have developed differently as well, in several ways, which begs the question do we want our probate files online?

The short answer is no, the IRS code does not allow an estate to  declare bankruptcy. But that does not mean there are not real life situations where an estate may leave more debt that it has assets. As I had posted about before, over half of Michael Jacksons one trillion dollar plus estate was subsumed by debt. So what can you do if you are stuck being the Personal Representative of an Estate in Florida with more liabilities (or debts) than assets? 

If you ever read your will (and I hope you have) you may have noticed a clause  that says if someone dies within a certain amount of time (usually 90 days) then that person does not count as pre-deceasing you. This effects their rights of inheritance. When you read that section you were probably thinking to yourself, “seriously what are the odds?” A tragic case out of the Court of Appeals of Tennessee decided on February 19, 2015 shows that it may be more common that you realize and it can change how your assets are distributed.