Florida Statute 736.0503: The Three Claims a Spendthrift Trust Cannot Stop

What Section 736.0503 Says

Somebody owes you support and cannot pay, except that they are not exactly poor. They live in a house they do not technically own, drive a car somebody else pays for, and take vacations funded by a trust their parents set up. Every enforcement tool you have tried has come back empty, because on paper there is nothing there.

This is the section written for that situation, and Florida law is less protective of that beneficiary than most people expect.

Three exceptions, and they are much narrower than the word exception suggests.

(a) Support claimants. A child, a spouse, or a former spouse who holds a judgment or court order for support or maintenance. This is the one that carries essentially every reported Florida case. Subsection (1) makes the definition of child deliberately wide, covering any person for whom a support order has been entered in this or any other state, so an order from Ohio or New Jersey counts.

(b) Someone who protected the trust interest. A judgment creditor who has provided services for the protection of a beneficiary’s interest in the trust. This is not a general exception for anyone who did work for the beneficiary. It is aimed at claims arising from preserving the trust interest itself.

(c) A government claim, but only if another law says so. A claim of this state or the United States, and only to the extent a Florida or federal law so provides. On its own this paragraph grants nothing. It opens a door for a different statute to walk through.

Everyone else, and that is most creditors, is outside this section entirely. A credit card issuer, a bank, a judgment creditor from a business dispute, a landlord, a plaintiff in an accident case. For them the spendthrift provision holds and the governing rules are on our page for Fla. Stat. 736.0504. The section sits inside the broader Florida Trust Code, and the clause it carves into is explained on our Florida spendthrift trust page.

The 1985 Case Behind All of It

This statute did not invent anything. It wrote down an answer the Florida Supreme Court gave in 1985, in a case where a former wife tried to garnish her ex-husband’s spendthrift trust for unpaid alimony and attorney fees, and the Third District said she could not.

The Supreme Court quashed that decision. It framed the problem as a collision between two things Florida believes.

“On the one hand, there is the long held policy of this state that recognizes the validity of spendthrift trusts. On the other hand, there is the even longer held policy of this state that requires a former spouse or a parent to pay alimony or child support in accordance with court orders.”

Bacardi v. White, 463 So. 2d 218, 221 (Fla. 1985).

Then it said which one gives way.

“We have weighed the competing public policies and, although we reaffirm the validity of spendthrift trusts, we conclude that in these types of cases the restraint of spendthrift trusts should not be an absolute bar to the enforcement of alimony orders or judgments.”

Bacardi, 463 So. 2d at 222.

The court then built two limits into the answer, and both of them survive word for word in the statute today. The first is the gate.

“This enforcement alternative should be allowed only as a last resort.”

“When these traditional remedies are not effective, it would be unjust and inequitable to allow the debtor to enjoy the benefits of wealth without being subject to the responsibility to support those whom he has a legal obligation to support.”

Bacardi, 463 So. 2d at 222.

The second limit is the one that decides how these cases are actually litigated, and it is the sentence to memorize if you read nothing else on this page.

“If disbursements are wholly within the trustee’s discretion, the court may not order the trustee to make such disbursements. However, if the trustee exercises its discretion and makes a disbursement, that disbursement may be subject to the writ of garnishment.”

Bacardi, 463 So. 2d at 222.

Read those two sentences together and the whole shape of the remedy appears. Nobody is going to force money out of a discretionary trust. What happens instead is that a standing order sits in the path of whatever comes out, so the trustee faces a choice between paying the support claimant and paying nothing at all.

One necessary caution about using this decision. It was handed down in 1985, more than twenty years before the Florida Trust Code existed, so it construes no section of chapter 736. It matters because Florida’s Second District has held that sections 736.0503 and 736.0504 codify it, which is the subject of the next section.

What the Trust Code Did With It

In 2013 the Second District decided the case that shows what the codified version does in practice, and the facts are memorable.

A thirty-year marriage ended in 2007. The settlement gave the former wife $16,000 a month in permanent alimony. The former husband stopped paying in 2011 while continuing to live, along with his current wife, entirely on four family discretionary trusts. The trusts paid the mortgage, the property taxes, the homeowner’s insurance, the electricity, water, garbage, sewer, telephone, internet, lawn care, pool care, and pest control. A trust-funded credit card covered travel, entertainment, clothing, medical expenses, grooming, gifts, and the current wife’s own card bills, plus cash advances to pay the maid. Neither he nor his wife was employed and neither intended to look for work. Days before a hearing he deeded his interest in the residence into a previously undisclosed trust, then testified eight days later that no such trust existed.

When garnishment came into view, the trustees stopped paying him directly and started paying his creditors instead, and argued that section 736.0504 protected discretionary trusts absolutely.

The Second District affirmed a continuing writ of garnishment. It first applied the exception.

“Thus, the spendthrift provisions included in Berlinger’s trusts are unenforceable as to Casselberry because she has an order against him for support.”

Berlinger v. Casselberry, 133 So. 3d 961, 965 (Fla. 2d DCA 2013).

Then it read section 736.0504 closely and found the space the statute leaves open.

“The section does not expressly prohibit a former spouse from obtaining a writ of garnishment against discretionary disbursements made by a trustee exercising its discretion. As a result, it makes no difference that the instant trusts are discretionary.”

“Neither section protects a discretionary trust from garnishment by a former spouse with a valid order of support.”

Berlinger, 133 So. 3d at 966.

And it stated the ranking of the two policies as Florida law now applies it.

“Florida has a public policy favoring spendthrift provisions in trusts and protecting a beneficiary’s trust income; however it gives way to Florida’s strong public policy favoring enforcement of alimony and support orders.”

Berlinger, 133 So. 3d at 966, following Gilbert v. Gilbert, 447 So. 2d 299, 302 (Fla. 2d DCA 1984), quoted in that opinion.

The order the trial court entered is worth describing, because it is the template. All distributions made directly or indirectly to, on behalf of, or for the benefit of the former husband were to be made payable to the former wife unless no alimony or arrears were owed at the time. And if the trustee wanted to distribute anything beyond the outstanding alimony, the trustee had to seek court approval first, so that enough remained in the trust to secure continued payment.

The Special Needs Trust Case

In 2019 the Second District went further, and this is the decision that surprises people who work with these trusts.

The father was the sole beneficiary of a special needs trust funded with the settlement of a product liability action brought after he was catastrophically injured in a car accident as a minor. He controlled nothing. He could not compel the trustee to pay anything. He received no disbursements personally; the trustee paid third parties for his sole benefit. The trust took in about $3,035 a month, his historic expenses ran about $2,478 a month, and the corpus was roughly $141,997 at the end of 2016. His child support arrearage was $91,780.28.

The trial court refused to enforce, finding he had no ability to pay. The Second District reversed and ordered a continuing writ of garnishment.

The court dealt with the routing-around-the-order tactic first.

“Whether the disbursements are paid directly to the beneficiary or to third parties for his benefit is immaterial to whether they may be garnished.”

Alexander v. Harris, No. 2D17-3218 (Fla. 2d DCA May 17, 2019) (slip op. at 3).

It was equally direct about the type of trust involved.

“The discretionary disbursements made by the trustee are not protected from continuing garnishment for payment of child support.”

“The special needs trust does not protect the father from his legal obligation to support his child.”

Alexander, slip op. at 4 and 6.

The father argued that paying support out of the trust would cost him his public benefits. The court looked for authority and reported that it could find none.

“We can find no federal law or regulation expressly addressing the garnishment of a special needs trust to satisfy a support obligation.”

Alexander, slip op. at 4.

Now the part that has to be said clearly, because this case gets quoted badly. This is not a decision that special needs trusts fail. It is a decision about one of the three classes of claimant the Legislature carved out of spendthrift protection, and the beneficiary’s child was in that class. Against an ordinary creditor, a discretionary trust remains protected in Florida, and the Fourth District applied that protection in 2010 against a judgment of more than one million dollars. A properly drafted special needs trust also continues to do the job it exists for. If you are a parent or a trustee holding one of these, this decision is a reason to get specific advice about a specific support order, not a reason to change the plan. Our Florida special needs trust page covers the instrument itself.

And the usual caution, which applies to every case on this page: these are published decisions in other families’ matters, not cases this firm handled, and none of them predicts what happens in yours.

The Last Resort Condition

Everything above is available only after a gate that the Legislature wrote into the end of subsection (3). The remedies apply to a claim by a beneficiary’s child, spouse, former spouse, or a judgment creditor who protected the trust interest only as a last resort upon an initial showing that traditional methods of enforcing the claim are insufficient.

Florida’s Supreme Court explained the reasoning before the Code existed. If the debtor or the debtor’s property is within the reach of the state’s courts, ordinary enforcement may well be enough, and in that event there is no overriding reason to defeat what the person who created the trust intended. Florida gives courts a variety of tools for enforcing alimony and child support. The trust is the last of them, not the first.

In practice that turns into a record you have to build before you file.

• What you actually tried. Wage garnishment, levies, judgment liens, contempt proceedings, deposition in aid of execution, income deduction orders. Dates and outcomes.
• What income and assets exist outside the trust. In the 2019 case the appellate court noted the mother had exhausted the traditional methods and that the trust was the father’s only available income for support.
• Why the shortfall is structural rather than temporary. A pattern of nonpayment while the beneficiary lives well is the picture the cases describe.

This is the element most likely to be argued against you, and it is the one most often skipped. Note also that the statute lets a court limit the award to such relief as is appropriate under the circumstances, so how much of the flow a court diverts is discretionary even after the gate is cleared. Nobody can tell you from a web page what a judge would order in your case.

What a Court Can and Cannot Order

The distinction here is precise, and both sides of these cases win or lose on it.

A court cannot compel a discretionary distribution. Section 736.0504 says a creditor, expressly including a creditor described in section 736.0503(2), may not compel a distribution subject to the trustee’s discretion. So a trustee who genuinely stops distributing cannot be ordered to start.

A court cannot attach the interest itself. The beneficiary’s bare expectancy inside a discretionary trust is not reachable.

A court can attach the distributions the trustee chooses to make. That is what a continuing writ of garnishment does, and it reaches payments made to third parties for the beneficiary’s benefit exactly as it reaches payments made to the beneficiary.

Two more provisions belong in the same analysis, and they are easy to miss.

If the trust requires a distribution rather than permitting one, none of this discretionary analysis applies. Under section 736.0506 a creditor may reach a mandatory distribution the trustee has failed to make within a reasonable time after the designated distribution date, whether or not the trust contains a spendthrift provision. That is why the first document anybody should read is the distribution provision itself, not the spendthrift clause.

And subsection (3) authorizes an order obtained from a court or pursuant to the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act, which matters when the support order came from another state.

If You Are the Trustee

Trustees land in the middle of these fights without having done anything wrong, and there is a specific piece of guidance that Florida’s Supreme Court gave and that most trustees never hear.

“We also note that where a continuing garnishment is appropriate, the trustee, if it wishes to make payments to the debtor-beneficiary in excess of alimony then due, should seek court approval before it makes such payments.”

Bacardi, 463 So. 2d at 223.

That is the trustee’s safe path, and it is exactly what the trial court in the 2013 case built into its order. A few practical points follow from all of this.

• Restructuring payments to defeat the order is the losing move. Paying vendors instead of the beneficiary has been litigated twice in Florida and failed both times, and in the 2013 case the maneuvering is described at length in the opinion.
• Your duties to the other beneficiaries do not pause. Whatever you decide, it has to be defensible as administration, and the duty to inform and account keeps running. That is on our page for Fla. Stat. 736.0813.
• Get advice before the distribution, not after. A payment made in the face of a served writ is a different problem from a payment made before one existed.

Whichever chair you are in, the work here is documentary. Which class the claim falls into, what the support order actually says, whether the trust distributions are discretionary or mandatory, and what the collection history looks like. Trust disputes are quoted after we have read the documents, because the work depends on what the papers say. The consult is a free 30 minutes, and there is no charge for hearing that we do not think the claim is there. See our Florida trust litigation page for how these matters run. Book a free consult →

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The arrearage that keeps growing. A mother in Pinellas holds a support order and years of unpaid arrears. The father has no wages to garnish and no assets in his name, and a trust pays for the life he lives. Her instinct is that the trust is untouchable. Under Florida law her claim sits in the first exception class, and the work is building the record of what she has already tried so the last resort showing is there when she files. That record is mostly documents she already has.

The trustee who wants to do the right thing. An aunt serving as trustee for her nephew learns that a writ has been served and that he owes support. She does not want to fund his avoidance and she does not want to be personally exposed. The Supreme Court’s answer is to go to the court before making payments beyond what is owed, rather than deciding unilaterally. That is a short, inexpensive step compared to what happens if she guesses.

The equitable distribution judgment. A former spouse in Broward holds a judgment from a divorce and assumes it lets him reach his ex-wife’s family trust. The exception covers support and maintenance, and an equitable distribution award is not automatically either. Which category a particular judgment falls into is a genuine question with real consequences, and it is worth answering before anyone spends money on a garnishment that gets quashed.

Sources of Law

• Fla. Stat. §736.0503 (exceptions to spendthrift provision: subsection (1) defines “child” to include any person for whom a support order or judgment has been entered in this or any other state; subsection (2) lists the three classes against which a spendthrift provision is unenforceable; subsection (3) supplies the remedy, an order attaching present or future distributions to or for the benefit of the beneficiary, permits a court to limit the award to such relief as is appropriate, and imposes the last resort condition on the claimants described in paragraphs (2)(a) and (2)(b)). Official text, Online Sunshine. History: s. 5, ch. 2006-217; s. 13, ch. 2007-153. (retrieved 2026-08-13)
• Related sections from the same official source: §736.0502 (spendthrift provision); §736.0504 (discretionary trusts; the bar on compelling a distribution or attaching the interest, expressly including a creditor described in §736.0503(2)); §736.0506 (a creditor may reach a mandatory distribution the trustee has not made within a reasonable time after the designated distribution date, whether or not the trust contains a spendthrift provision). (retrieved 2026-08-13)
• Bacardi v. White, 463 So. 2d 218 (Fla. Jan. 31, 1985), quashing White v. Bacardi, 446 So. 2d 150 (Fla. 3d DCA 1984). Quoted above at 221, 222, and 223. Source: CourtListener. Source caveat: no official 1985 slip opinion PDF exists online, so the text is a reporter-derived rendering carrying Southern Reporter star pagination, which supplies the pin cites. Reading note: this decision predates the Florida Trust Code by more than two decades and construes no section of chapter 736. It is relevant because Florida’s Second District has held that §§736.0503 and 736.0504 codify it. The passages quoted at 221 and 222 are independently confirmed at the same pin cites inside the Second District’s 2019 slip opinion in Alexander v. Harris and its 2013 opinion in Berlinger. (retrieved 2026-08-13)
• Berlinger v. Casselberry, 133 So. 3d 961 (Fla. 2d DCA Nov. 27, 2013); affirmed. Quoted above at 965 and 966. Source: CourtListener. Source caveat: no official Second District slip opinion PDF was retrievable for this 2013 opinion, so the text is a reporter-derived rendering with Southern Reporter star pagination. That rendering carries visible scanning artifacts elsewhere in the opinion, including line-break hyphenation of party names and one mangled statutory citation; none of the passages quoted here contains any of them, and we neither reproduce nor characterize the mangled citation, since a scanning artifact cannot be distinguished from a court’s own slip without the official file. Gilbert v. Gilbert, 447 So. 2d 299 (Fla. 2d DCA 1984), is cited above only as it appears inside Berlinger; we did not retrieve the Gilbert opinion itself. (retrieved 2026-08-13)
• Alexander v. Harris, No. 2D17-3218 (Fla. 2d DCA May 17, 2019), appeal from the Circuit Court for Pinellas County; reversed and remanded with instructions to enter a continuing writ of garnishment. Quoted above at slip op. 3, 4, and 6. Source: the official Second District slip opinion PDF; CourtListener mirror. No Southern Reporter citation appeared in CourtListener’s citation table when this page was prepared, so pin cites are to slip opinion pages, and the slip carries the standard legend that it is not final until the time to file a rehearing motion expires and any such motion is determined. (retrieved 2026-08-13)
• Miller v. Kresser, 34 So. 3d 172 (Fla. 4th DCA 2010), referenced above for the creditor-protection side of the same Part V scheme. Discussed in full, with the court’s own language, on our §736.0504 page. (retrieved 2026-08-13)
• Gap note, stated for the record: the Florida appellate decisions construing §736.0503 that we located all arise under paragraph (2)(a), the support class. We located no Florida appellate decision construing paragraph (2)(b) or paragraph (2)(c), so the outer edges of those two exceptions have not been drawn. No citator pass was run on this research, so the absence of a negative-treatment note is not a clean bill of health, and a later decision could change any of it.
• Quotation note: the passages above reproduce the courts’ own published words and the Legislature’s own statutory text. Court opinions and statutes are public records, and nothing here is drawn from a commercial research service or from any editorial layer such as a headnote or case summary.
• The decisions on this page are published rulings in other parties’ cases, not matters handled by this firm. Outcomes depend on the specific trust language, the terms of the support order, and the record in each case, and nothing here predicts a result or promises that any particular trust can be reached.

Updated on August 13, 2026. Reviewed by Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., Fla. Bar No. 99502. Attorney Kevin Klagge represents families, businesses, and international clients in estate and tax planning, business structuring, and international law, with a focus on Florida legal tools. He litigates estate and business issues in court. General information about Florida law and published court decisions, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Whether section 736.0503 reaches a particular trust depends on the trust’s own language, the support order, and the facts, which we review at a free consult. Please do not send confidential details until we have connected.