Recent Blog Posts
Estate Planning New Year’s Resolutions for 2020
Making an estate plan should make you feel proud of your accomplishments. You have stayed healthy and financially solvent into your retirement years. As your children and grandchildren leave after a holiday visit, which the gifts you generously gave them and the successes you have helped them achieve, look back over the past years… Read More »
What Happens If a Person Changes Their Will While Suffering from Dementia?
An early part of the process of probate involves publicly reading the deceased person’s will. Some family members might be pleasantly surprised to receive a greater share of the estate than they were expecting, while others might be in for a rude awakening; they might receive less than they had hoped, or nothing at… Read More »
Sale of Real Estate Properties During Probate, and How to Avoid It
If you think that disputes over inheritance money can lead to long-standing grudges among siblings, or between your children and your stepparent, imagine how much worse those disputes can be when the inherited property at stake is a house or other piece of real estate property instead of just money. It is easy to… Read More »
New Nursing Home Directory Has Flagged 25 Florida Facilities for Abuse and Neglect of Patients
Nursing home abuse is frightening, most of all because vulnerable patients often cannot speak up about it. Therefore, family members might remain unaware for years of the abuse and neglect that their loved ones are enduring. Sometimes it takes a disastrous event, like a MRSA infection spreading through a nursing home because of substandard… Read More »
Florida’s Laws Protecting Elderly People from Dishonest Professional Guardians Are Not Strong Enough
Imagine watching helplessly while a virtual stranger spent your money and authorized medical treatments to be administered to you or withheld from you. Imagine that, if you objected to this treatment, your objections would carry no weight, nor would the objections of your closest family members, because the stranger was legally responsible for you. … Read More »
People Going Through a Divorce Should Update Their Estate Plans
Late in life divorce is more common than you might think. The media stereotype is that, if you make it past the seven-year itch and the midlife crisis, you are together forever, but the truth is more complicated. Although Burt and Lovey Handelsman, the octogenarians who divided their Florida real estate empire when they… Read More »
Caring for Elderly Relatives at Home Can Work for Your Family If You Plan Carefully
Caring for family members is hard work. In the 1980s, television episodes and standup comedy routines sometimes used to include jokes about how much money a woman would earn if she got paid a fair wage for all her work cooking, cleaning, and otherwise caring for her husband and children. More recently, the public… Read More »
Reopening an Estate Can Resolve Inheritance Disputes
Estate planning can prevent a lot of disputes over inheritance. Under the best circumstances, you can designate a beneficiary for each of your assets such that your estate does not even need to go through probate. Even if you are not able to do this, writing a will and being honest with your family… Read More »
How to Object to Probate in Florida
From all the advice online about how to keep your assets out of probate, you would think that probate was the stuff of nightmares. In fact, the probate process usually moves along smoothly, and all the heirs get their inheritance once the estate settles. The reason probate takes several months is that it has… Read More »
Can You Appoint Someone Who Lives Out of State as the Personal Representative of Your Estate?
Today, it is common to live hundreds of miles away from your closest relatives and most trusted friends. Every year many people travel from out of state to visit their grandparents in Florida; the flipside is that many elderly Florida residents do not have any family members living in Florida. You are wise to… Read More »
