Hernando County Law Blog

Not all inheritances are needed or wanted, as we at The Day Law Office are aware. If, like many Florida residents after the death of their parents, you find yourself with possessions you have no room or need for, you may feel guilty even thinking about donating or throwing away these items. Fortunately, there may be a better way to unload the unnecessary personal items that you inherited, and to benefit from it as well.

Estate sales are often held for this purpose, as HowStuffWorks explains. You may have seen estate sales advertised in your local paper or online, but you never knew what they were. Rather than holding a yard or garage sale, people who have estate sales are selling items they inherited from deceased loved ones in a more professional, organized manner.

Most in Hernando County may view the probate process as only dealing with the distribution of assets to an estate's beneficiaries. Yet the actual purpose is to settle all of a decedent's financial affairs. This includes any creditors claims that might have been pending against them at the time of their death. If you have been selected as the personal representative of the estate of family member or friend, you may cringe at the thought of having to worry about paying off bills for years and years to come. Fortunately, Florida's Probate Code addresses the amount of time creditors are afforded to make a claim against a person's estate. 

According to Section 733.702 of the aforementioned code, creditors have three months to respond to your publication of the notice to creditors to submit claims against the estate. For those creditors that you may be required to submit such a notice to individually, due to the nature of their claims, they have 30 from the receipt that notice to respond. There may be cases where unique circumstances prevent a creditor from submitting the complete details of a claim within the afforded time period. In such a scenario, the court may offer a filing extension. However, in general, no new claims are allowed to be submitted against an estate after two years has passed since your loved one's death. 

Florida law automatically removes all inheritance rights your ex has by default in your will after your divorce is finalized. Therefore, you probably would not have to worry about any type of automatic inheritance rights your ex has.

That said, this could be an opportunity to review your estate plan and make sure everything is set up correctly. Even though it is included in Florida state law on divorce, the automatic revocation of your ex-spouse's primary inheritance rights may not be right for you. 

Many in Hernando County may currently be experiencing domestic abuse at the hands of a spouse. Some might say that those in such situations should simply leave. Those suffering from such violence, however, may find that leaving is not as easy as many outsiders may think. A common element that often accompanies domestic violence is threats of escalating abuse of a victim ever tries to leave. Abusers will often direct such threats at the victims, their families and friends, or (worse yet) even their children. Thus, abuse victims live in fear that their is nothing that can be done to help free them from their marriages. 

It may be easy to excuse such threats as just that, yet those who make them often have every intention to follow through with them. This may have been exactly what happened in a recent shooting that occurred outside of a police station in Mississippi. A man shot his estranged wife in the parking lot outside the station before turning the gun on himself. The wife had filed for divorce from him in February (the couple had been separated since December). She also had sought a protective order against him (as well as custody of their children) after he reportedly threw a glass at her. The husband died from his wounds; the wife remains hospitalized in critical condition.