This one is under $75,000.In Florida, an estate of that size must go through probate. The Florida Rules of Probate require a probate case to be handled by an attorney. The first step is filing a Petition for Administration with the clerk of court in the decedent's county of residence. I thought it might be possible for a non-attorney to file that Petition, just to get the case started, but I was shut down by the clerk of court's office. There is no publicly available standard form or boilerplate for any of the documents needed for a probate case. There seems to be no way for a layman to do it. Estates with assets less than $75,000 can file a Petition for Summary Administration, which supposedly can be done by a layman.
The Florida Probate Statute sets a standard legal fee of 3% of the estate's assets. Some law firms charge the standard fee. Others will do it by the hour. I have been involved in two probate cases with assets similar to the one you're describing, and hired law firms that charged by the hour. I am not a Florida resident. It's possible to do everything remotely, since the law firm does all the filings.
In Florida the executor is referred to as the "Personal Representative."
The reason you don't need a lawyer for a summary administration for an estate under $75,000 is that while a personal representative needs to have a lawyer (Florida Probate Rule 5.030, https://www-media.floridabar.org/upload ... 4-23-1.pdf (see page 26)), there's no personal representative for a summary administration.
This estate is under $75,000. The assets passing outside the Will don't count.
Of course, by naming beneficiaries for the brokerage account, they gave up the opportunity to leave it to the children in trust to keep it out of their estates and to protect it against their creditors and spouses, and Medicaid. However, when divided three ways, each child's share is relatively modest, and if the risk of any of these things happening is sufficiently small it might not be worth the effort. It also risked an unintended result if a child predeceased them, and it risked chaos if one child balked at contributing his/her share of any debts, taxes and expenses, but in this case the children are cooperating.
A drawback of summary admininstration is that you have to be able to identify all of the assets in advance, which many people can't do, but in this case they seem to have been able to identify the assets.
We handle estates on a time basis. It's usually much less than a percentage fee.
I didn't see any requirement to have a lawyer for the petition to determine homestead.
... a homestead estate requires an attorney to file. The only kink I can see is that it sits on leased land. Maybe a layperson could do a probate action because it's not affecting the land interest. But, still, it would be nice to have a local attorney to guide the process.
I haven't needed to get many homestead determinations. If we're not concened about creditor protection for the property (in other words, where the other assets were sufficient to pay any creditors), we've been able to get title companies to accept deeds signed by both the persons who would take if the property is homestead and the persons who would take if the property is not homestead.
I got a homestead determination once in what could have been a disputed domicile case between Florida and a northern state. I thought that getting a homestead determination would add a feather to the scale on the Florida side. I have another such case now and will probably get a homestead determination for the same reason.
Statistics: Posted by bsteiner — Sun Jul 07, 2024 10:09 am — Replies 12 — Views 680