Recent Blog Posts
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 »
What Happens to the Money in a Trust When Someone Associated with the Trust Gets a Divorce?
Divorce is one of the most formidable foes of long-term planning, especially when it comes to finances. Most couples get married with the intention of combining their wealth and jointly passing it on to their descendants. If you and your spouse have delved deeply enough into estate planning to have set up a revocable… Read More »
Don’t Become a Victim of Florida’s Flawed Elder Guardianship System
It is hard to talk frankly with your family about the possibility of you becoming too ill to care for yourself and make decisions. It is even worse, though, if you don’t talk about it. Too many elderly people in reasonably good health have had their decision-making power taken away from them when the… Read More »
Candida Auris Is the Latest Scary Drug-Resistant Infection in Florida Nursing Homes
Even though the ads on TV might suggest otherwise, most cases of nursing home neglect do not involve nurses intentionally mistreating patients or withholding care from them. In most cases, nursing homes are simply understaffed, and the nurses do their best to care for more patients than they can reasonably be expected to handle. … Read More »
