Legal Question in Wills and Trusts in Florida

My father in law passed away 5 months ago without a Will. The estate is currently in probate and my husband (no other siblings) is the Personal Representative. His stepmother and her family will not provide him with any financial information (although asked on multiple occasions), and claim they have received nothing and do not know where any money is located. This is not true (going from bank to bank), as the wife has already withdrawn close to $40K from two accounts, after his death. We were told by our attorney that all financial information must be reported, whether held jointly or in his name alone. We found paperwork in home (wife no longer resides there) of over $700K in CDs held in the same bank where the wife withdrew from one of the accounts. The only one she closed was where she was the only beneficiary. We told them what we found (CD#'s and amounts only), and still silence. The remaining accounts have FIL or STMIL, POD, then my husband, her daughter and another relative as beneficiaries. What does this mean, and could she remove my husband as a beneficiary without his knowledge, now that his father has passed? Info was updated three months before he passed.Thanks.


Asked on 3/25/17, 5:32 pm

1 Answer from Attorneys
David Pilcher Bogin, Munns & Munns, P.A.

Any accounts that had no beneficiary designations on them would be part of your father-in-law's estate. However, any accounts that did have beneficiaries on them would pass to those beneficiaries by operation of law and without any probate required as they are not considered to be part of the probate estate. As Personal Representative your husband can ask for bank records from the decedent's accounts, but you may get resistance from some banks if mother-in-law is a joint tenant on the account because they don't want to disclose her banking information. The most interesting question here may be when the beneficiary designations were set up, but it is usually very difficult to undo a spouse being designated as the beneficiary, unless you can show it was mother-in-law who filled out the forms to make those changes, and even then this sort of matter will likely involve expensive litigation to resolve.

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Answered on 3/27/17, 5:21 am


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