What Section 736.0505 Says
This is the section behind the single most marketed question in Florida estate planning. Can I put my assets in a trust and keep my own creditors away from them?
It is also the section people are most often told the wrong answer about, usually by somebody selling a document. So read it yourself. It is short, and the second rule is the one that decides most cases.
Fla. Stat. §736.0505, subsections (1) and (2)
736.0505 Creditors’ claims against settlor.
(1) Whether or not the terms of a trust contain a spendthrift provision, the following rules apply:
- The property of a revocable trust is subject to the claims of the settlor’s creditors during the settlor’s lifetime to the extent the property would not otherwise be exempt by law if owned directly by the settlor.
- With respect to an irrevocable trust, a creditor or assignee of the settlor may reach the maximum amount that can be distributed to or for the settlor’s benefit. If a trust has more than one settlor, the amount the creditor or assignee of a particular settlor may reach may not exceed the settlor’s interest in the portion of the trust attributable to that settlor’s contribution.
- Notwithstanding the provisions of paragraph (b), the assets of an irrevocable trust may not be subject to the claims of an existing or subsequent creditor or assignee of the settlor, in whole or in part, solely because of the existence of a discretionary power granted to the trustee by the terms of the trust, or any other provision of law, to pay directly to the taxing authorities or to reimburse the settlor for any tax on trust income or principal which is payable by the settlor under the law imposing such tax.
(2) For purposes of this section:
- During the period the power may be exercised, the holder of a power of withdrawal is treated in the same manner as the settlor of a revocable trust to the extent of the property subject to the power.
- Upon the lapse, release, or waiver of the power, the holder is treated as the settlor of the trust only to the extent the value of the property affected by the lapse, release, or waiver exceeds the greater of the amount specified in: 1. Section 2041(b)(2) or s. 2514(e); or 2. Section 2503(b) and, if the donor was married at the time of the transfer to which the power of withdrawal applies, twice the amount specified in s. 2503(b), of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended.
Quoted from the official Florida Statutes at Online Sunshine, §736.0505 (retrieved August 13, 2026). Subsection (3), the spousal trust rule added in 2022, is set out further down this page. History: s. 5, ch. 2006-217; s. 5, ch. 2010-122; s. 2, ch. 2022-101.
Three things in there decide almost everything.
The opening words, “Whether or not the terms of a trust contain a spendthrift provision.” A spendthrift clause is irrelevant here. That clause is a powerful thing when somebody else creates a trust for you, which is the subject of our page on section 736.0504. Against your own creditors, on your own trust, it does nothing at all.
The end of paragraph (a), “to the extent the property would not otherwise be exempt by law if owned directly by the settlor.” This is the sentence that keeps a Florida homestead protected inside a living trust, and it is the reason the revocable trust rule sounds harsher than it plays out for most families. The trust does not create protection; it also does not destroy the protection you already had.
The word “can” hiding inside paragraph (b). A creditor may reach the maximum amount that can be distributed to or for the settlor’s benefit. Not the amount the trustee will distribute, or has distributed, or is likely to distribute. The amount that could be. If the trustee has discretion to hand you the entire trust, a creditor stands exactly where you stand. This section sits inside the broader Florida Trust Code.
Why No Florida Appellate Court Has Answered This
Here is something worth knowing before you read another page on this topic. We located no Florida appellate decision construing section 736.0505. Not one, in the nineteen years since the Florida Trust Code took effect, on the provision that decides whether self-settled asset protection works in this state.
That sounds alarming until you think about when this question actually reaches a courtroom. It is not a dispute between family members about a document. It is a creditor trying to collect, and a debtor trying not to pay, and in the United States that fight has a natural home, which is bankruptcy court. So the law of this section has been made almost entirely by federal judges in Florida applying Florida law, and looking only at the state appellate reports gives you a badly misleading picture of how settled the question is.
The rule those courts apply comes from the Eleventh Circuit, in a 2002 decision that predates the Trust Code and that both Florida bankruptcy decisions below still run on. The debtor there had put her own money into a trust for herself with a spendthrift clause attached.
“Where a trust is self-funded by a beneficiary, however, there is an issue as to whether the trust’s spendthrift provision is valid as against creditors of the settlor-beneficiary. We conclude it is not, and the beneficiary’s interest is subject to alienation by her creditors.”
Menotte v. Brown (In re Brown), 303 F.3d 1261 (11th Cir. 2002) (slip op. at 7).
The reason reaches back to a Florida Supreme Court definition from 1911.
“As impliedly recognized by the definition of spendthrift trusts set forth in Croom, Florida law will not protect assets contained within a spendthrift trust to the extent the settlor creates the trust for her own benefit, rather than for the benefit of another.”
Menotte v. Brown, slip op. at 8. The definition it refers to describes spendthrift trusts as those “created with a view of providing a fund for the maintenance of another, and at the same time securing it against his own improvidence or incapacity for self-protection.” Croom v. Ocala Plumbing & Elec. Co., 57 So. 243, 244 (Fla. 1911), quoted in Brown, slip op. at 8.
For another. That is the whole idea, and it is nearly a century older than the statute. A trust protects the person it was set up for. It was never designed to protect the person who set it up.
One caution about how we are using these. Bankruptcy court opinions are unevenly published, so the decisions below are the ones we located rather than a complete census, and no citator pass was run on them. They are also published rulings in other people’s cases, not matters this firm handled, and they predict nothing about yours.
The Revocable Trust Rule
Start with the trust most Florida families already have, because the answer here is short and a lot of people have been told otherwise.
A revocable living trust is not creditor protection. You can undo it whenever you like, which means the property is still yours in every way that matters to a creditor. Paragraph (1)(a) says so directly, and in 2010 a Florida bankruptcy court applied it to a debtor who had funded a revocable trust of which she was the sole beneficiary and kept complete control over its only asset, an investment account.
“However, when the settlor creates the trust for her own benefit, rather than for the benefit of another, a spendthrift provision will not protect assets.”
“The Trust in this case was funded by the Debtor, the Trust’s sole beneficiary. The Debtor retained complete dominion and control over the Trust’s asset, the Investment Account. Under these circumstances, the Debtor’s interest in the Trust and the Investment Account are property of the bankruptcy estate, subject to the claims of all of the Debtor’s creditors.”
In re Nichols, 434 B.R. 906, 909 (Bankr. M.D. Fla. 2010).
The court then pointed at the statute itself.
“Further, since the Trust is revocable, the Investment Account is subject to the claims of the Debtor’s creditors pursuant to Florida Statute § 736.0505, which provides”
In re Nichols, 434 B.R. at 909, followed in the opinion by a block quotation of §736.0505(1)(a).
None of that makes a revocable trust a bad idea. It is the right instrument for a great many Florida families, and what it actually delivers is real: no probate, a plan that keeps working if you lose capacity, privacy, and a clean way to hold property in more than one state. Our Florida revocable living trust page covers what it does. Just do not buy one believing it does this.
And remember the qualifier at the end of paragraph (a). Property that was exempt in your own hands stays exempt in the trust. A Florida homestead held in a living trust does not shed its constitutional protection, and the same logic applies to protected annuities and retirement accounts. See Florida homestead creditor protection and retirement account protection.
The Irrevocable Trust Rule and the Offshore Case
Now the case that shows what paragraph (1)(b) does under pressure, and it is the most instructive Florida decision on this subject that we located.
The debtor faced a Federal Trade Commission judgment of roughly $14 million. His trust had been created years earlier under Cook Islands law, and its trustee later moved the trust’s situs to Belize and restated the document to adopt Belize law, which the original trust expressly permitted. He was the settlor and the primary beneficiary. The trust was fully discretionary, meaning he could not compel the trustee to pay him anything. He had already taken fourteen distributions from it. Along the way he moved $350,000 through his lawyer to the trustee, which used it to buy a Cayman Islands deferred variable annuity.
On paper this is the structure the offshore industry advertises. The court took it apart in two moves.
First, it refused to apply Belize law.
“Florida law strongly disfavors asset protection trusts, where the settlor is also the primary beneficiary and there are spendthrift protections.”
“To permit Mr. Rensin to rely on the law of Belize, to enforce an asset protection trust designed to offend his creditors, is contrary to Florida public policy. The Court will not apply Belize law but will apply the law of Florida to all aspects of the Joren Trust.”
Mehdipour v. Rensin (In re Rensin), 600 B.R. 870, 880 (Bankr. S.D. Fla. 2019).
That is the move that matters, and it is the one the sales material never mentions. A trust’s choice of a friendly foreign law is honored until a court decides it offends the forum’s public policy, and a Florida court has now said in writing that this kind of trust does.
Second, having applied Florida law, it read paragraph (1)(b) the way the drafters intended.
“Florida, like many states, adopted the Uniform Trust Code. Fla. Stat. § 736.0505 enacted section 505 of the Uniform Trust Code.”
“[i]f the trustee has discretion to distribute the entire income and principal to the settlor, the effect of this subsection is to place the settlor’s creditors in the same position as if the trust had not been created.”
In re Rensin, 600 B.R. at 881, the second passage quoting the official comment to Uniform Trust Code §505, which the court cited alongside the Restatement.
“The Joren Trustee has discretion to distribute the entire trust corpus to Mr. Rensin. Under Florida law, from inception of the Joren Trust, Mr. Rensin’s creditors could attach any and all assets of the trust. Put another way, the assets in the Joren Trust are not protected from execution under Florida law.”
In re Rensin, 600 B.R. at 881.
Read the phrase from inception. The trust was not defeated because of something the debtor did during the litigation. On the court’s reading it never protected anything, from the day it was signed, because of how it was built.
Wondering whether a structure you already paid for actually works?
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Book your free consultWhat Actually Survived in That Case
If we stopped there we would be telling you half a story, and the other half is the more useful half.
The annuity payments were exempt anyway. The debtor’s right to receive payments under the annuity contracts was protected, not by the offshore trust, but by an ordinary Florida statute that has been on the books for generations.
“It does not matter that the Joren Trust is the owner of the annuity contracts. Mr. Rensin is a citizen and resident of Florida. Mr. Rensin’s rights to payment under the annuities are exempt under Fla. Stat. § 222.14.”
In re Rensin, 600 B.R. at 882.
Sit with that for a second, because it is the lesson of the whole case. The trust that had been through two foreign jurisdictions gave him nothing. The plain Florida annuity exemption gave him a monthly income stream his creditors could not touch. Our page on Florida annuity and life insurance protection explains that exemption.
And the creditor still could not reach the trust assets in that proceeding. Not because the trust worked, but for a procedural reason.
“However, because the Joren Trustee is not a party to this action, the plaintiff cannot obtain enforceable relief regarding the assets of the Joren Trust.”
In re Rensin, 600 B.R. at 882.
So the honest scorecard reads this way. The offshore structure lost on the law completely, the creditor still faced a practical wall because the foreign trustee was beyond the court’s reach in that proceeding, and the thing that actually protected income for the debtor was a Florida exemption statute anyone can use for a fraction of the cost. That is a more complicated picture than either side of this industry usually presents, and it is the picture we would give you in a consult.
Two more limits worth stating plainly. This is one bankruptcy court decision. It is persuasive reading, not binding precedent, and a different judge could see a different structure differently. And separately from all of this, moving assets when a claim already exists raises Florida’s fraudulent transfer law, which is a different statute with its own consequences, and it is the reason the timing question below is not a technicality.
The Two Carve-Outs Most People Never Read
Two provisions cut the other way, and both are genuine planning tools rather than loopholes.
The tax reimbursement carve-out, paragraph (1)(c). A great many irrevocable trusts are deliberately drafted so that the person who created them keeps paying the income tax on the trust’s earnings. That is a feature. The trust grows without the drag of its own tax bill, and the tax payments are effectively additional gifts that do not use up an exemption. Some of those trusts also let the trustee reimburse the settlor for that tax, or pay the taxing authority directly. Without paragraph (1)(c) a creditor could argue that the reimbursement power is itself an amount that “can be distributed to or for the settlor’s benefit,” and that the whole trust is therefore exposed under paragraph (1)(b). The Legislature closed that argument. Assets are not reachable solely because such a discretionary tax power exists.
Notice the word solely, because it is the whole limit. Paragraph (1)(c) neutralizes one feature. It does not immunize a trust that has other strings running back to the settlor, and a trust that names the settlor as a discretionary beneficiary is still governed by paragraph (1)(b) no matter how its tax clause reads.
The spousal trust rule, subsection (3), added in 2022. This one is newer than most published summaries of Florida asset protection, and it changes a real planning conversation for married couples. In short, for trusts of the kinds the subsection describes, including certain marital trusts and an irrevocable trust in which the settlor’s spouse is a lifetime beneficiary while the settlor is not, and where transfers to the trust were completed gifts, the assets are deemed to have been contributed by the settlor’s spouse and not by the settlor after the spouse’s death. The subsection is expressly subject to Florida’s fraudulent transfer law.
In practice, a trust one spouse creates for the other can, if it is drafted to fit the subsection, continue to be treated as the other spouse’s trust rather than the creator’s once the beneficiary spouse has died, which is exactly when the old rule would otherwise have pulled it back toward the creator’s creditors. Whether a particular trust fits is a drafting question with real conditions attached, and it is one of the places where the difference between a form and a document written for your situation shows up. Our Florida irrevocable trust page covers the family of instruments this belongs to.
Becoming a Settlor by Accident
Subsection (2) answers a question people rarely think to ask. Can you be treated as the creator of a trust somebody else set up for you? Yes, and the trigger is a right you may never have used.
While you hold a power of withdrawal, meaning a right to pull property out of a trust, you are treated the same as the settlor of a revocable trust as to the property subject to that power. It does not matter that your parents funded the trust. For as long as you could take that money, your creditors are in the same position as if it were yours, because as a practical matter it is.
Then paragraph (2)(b) limits the hangover. Once the power lapses, is released, or is waived, you are treated as the settlor only to the extent the value affected exceeds the greater of two federal figures, the five and five amount in the estate and gift tax rules, or the annual gift tax exclusion amount, doubled if the donor was married when the transfer was made. Below that line, letting a withdrawal right lapse does not convert you into the trust’s settlor.
This is not an abstraction. Withdrawal rights are standard equipment in trusts designed to receive annual gifts, including many irrevocable life insurance trusts, and they exist to make the gifts qualify for the annual exclusion. The federal figures in paragraph (2)(b) are exactly why those trusts are drafted with the numbers they use. If you are a beneficiary of a family trust and someone mails you a notice each year telling you that you may withdraw an amount within thirty days, that notice is this rule in action, and it is worth understanding what it does to you rather than filing it unread.
What Actually Protects Assets in Florida
If section 736.0505 takes away the thing most people came looking for, the fair question is what is left. Quite a lot, actually, and Florida is unusually generous about it. The order of operations matters more than the exotic tools.
- Timing, before anything else. Protection that is put in place before a claim exists is planning. The same steps taken after a claim exists are a different legal question entirely, governed by Florida’s fraudulent transfer law and, in bankruptcy, by federal rules with long look-back periods. This is the single largest factor, it is the one nobody can fix later, and it is why the honest advice is to have the conversation while nothing is wrong. If something already is, read is it too late to protect assets before you move a dollar.
- Your homestead. Florida’s constitutional homestead protection is among the strongest in the country, it has no dollar cap, and it survives inside a properly drafted revocable trust. See homestead creditor protection. Federal bankruptcy law does impose its own limits on a home acquired shortly before filing, which is one of the fights that ran alongside the case above.
- Florida’s statutory exemptions. Annuities and life insurance cash value, qualified retirement accounts, wages of a head of family, and more. These did the real work in the 2019 case. See annuity and life insurance protection and retirement account protection.
- Tenancy by the entireties, for married couples, which can put jointly held property beyond the reach of one spouse’s individual creditors.
- A trust somebody else creates for you. This is the honest version of trust protection, and it is where the law is actually favorable. A trust your parents set up for you, drafted as discretionary with a spendthrift clause, is governed by a different section that generally keeps creditors out entirely, Fla. Stat. 736.0504. Which is the mirror image of this page. The same instrument protects the person it was made for and not the person who made it. So the highest-leverage asset protection most families ever do is not for themselves; it is leaving an inheritance in trust rather than outright.
- Business structuring, where the exposure comes from an enterprise rather than from personal liability. See LLC asset protection in Florida.
And the two things to be skeptical of. Florida is not a domestic asset protection trust state, so a Florida trust for your own benefit does not get statutory protection here; what does and does not work is on our Florida asset protection trust page. And an offshore trust is a serious, expensive, reporting-heavy structure whose published Florida record is the case on this page. There are situations where sophisticated structures make sense. There are more situations where someone paid a great deal for one when the homestead, the exemptions, and an entity would have done more.
Nobody can promise you an outcome under a statute no Florida appellate court has construed, and we will not. What we can do is read what you actually have, tell you where the timing puts you, and be straight about which parts of the plan are carrying weight and which parts are decoration. The consult is a free 30 minutes. Book a free consult →
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Creditors Reach a Revocable Living Trust in Florida?
Yes, during your lifetime. Section 736.0505(1)(a) provides that the property of a revocable trust is subject to the claims of the settlor’s creditors during the settlor’s lifetime, to the extent the property would not otherwise be exempt by law if you owned it directly. The words at the end matter. Your Florida homestead does not lose its constitutional protection because it sits in your living trust, and neither does an exempt annuity or a protected retirement account. What the trust adds is probate avoidance and management continuity, not a wall against creditors. In 2010 a Florida bankruptcy court applied this rule to a debtor who had funded a revocable trust of which she was the sole beneficiary and kept complete control of its investment account, and held the account was property of the bankruptcy estate. If someone sold you a living trust as creditor protection, that is not what it does.
Does an Irrevocable Trust Protect Assets From My Own Creditors in Florida?
Not if you can still benefit from it. Section 736.0505(1)(b) lets a creditor of the settlor reach the maximum amount that can be distributed to or for the settlor’s benefit. So the question is not whether the trustee will pay you, it is whether the trustee could. If the trustee has discretion to distribute the whole trust to you, the whole trust is exposed, and the official comment to the uniform provision that Florida enacted says the effect is to put the settlor’s creditors in the same position as if the trust had never been created. A Florida bankruptcy court applied exactly that reasoning in 2019 to a fully discretionary offshore trust. An irrevocable trust can protect assets in Florida, but generally only when you are genuinely out of it, meaning not a beneficiary, not able to be added as one, and with no strings back to you.
Do Offshore Asset Protection Trusts Work for Floridians?
The published Florida experience is not encouraging, and the 2019 decision discussed on this page is the clearest example we located. The trust there began under Cook Islands law and its trustee later moved the situs to Belize and restated the document to adopt Belize law. The court declined to apply Belize law at all, holding that enforcing an asset protection trust designed to offend the settlor’s creditors is contrary to Florida public policy, and applied Florida law to the whole trust. Under Florida law, because the trustee could distribute the entire corpus to him, his creditors could attach all of it. Two honest qualifications follow. That is one bankruptcy court decision, not binding appellate precedent, and in that same case the creditor still could not obtain enforceable relief over the offshore assets because the foreign trustee was never made a party. Anyone considering an offshore structure should read our page on offshore asset protection trusts and expect a candid conversation about cost, reporting, and what it does and does not do.
Has Any Florida Court Interpreted Section 736.0505?
No Florida appellate decision we located construes it. That is a real gap in the most heavily marketed area of trust law in the state. But the section is not unconstrued, and looking only at the state courts gives a misleading picture, because the question almost always reaches a court through a bankruptcy case or a judgment creditor’s collection effort, which means a federal court. Two Florida federal bankruptcy decisions apply it, one to a revocable trust in 2010 and one to an offshore discretionary trust in 2019, and both run on a 2002 Eleventh Circuit decision holding that a self-funded spendthrift trust is not valid against the settlor’s creditors. Both are discussed on this page. Bankruptcy opinions are unevenly published, so these are the decisions we located rather than a complete census, and no citator pass was run.
Is Florida a Domestic Asset Protection Trust State?
No. Florida has not enacted a statute allowing you to create an irrevocable trust for your own benefit and shield it from your own creditors, and section 736.0505(1)(b) points firmly the other way. States that have such statutes are a different legal environment, and a Florida resident who forms a trust in one of them is making a bet on which state’s law a court will apply, which is exactly the bet that failed in the 2019 case discussed here. That does not leave Floridians unprotected. It means the protection comes from other places, mainly Florida’s constitutional homestead, the statutory exemptions, tenancy by the entireties for married couples, and trusts created by somebody else for you. Our Florida asset protection trust page walks through what does and does not work here.
Does a Trust That Pays My Income Tax Lose Its Protection?
No, and paragraph (1)(c) says so expressly. Many irrevocable trusts are drafted so that the person who created them keeps paying the income tax on trust earnings, which is a feature rather than a bug because it lets the trust grow untaxed. Some of those trusts also let the trustee reimburse the settlor for that tax or pay the taxing authority directly. Paragraph (1)(c) provides that the assets of an irrevocable trust may not be subject to the claims of an existing or subsequent creditor of the settlor, in whole or in part, solely because such a discretionary tax reimbursement power exists. The word doing the work is solely. The carve-out neutralizes that one feature; it does not immunize a trust that has other strings running back to the settlor.
Can I Be Treated as the Creator of Someone Else’s Trust?
Yes, and this is the trap in subsection (2). If you hold a power of withdrawal over trust property, during the period you can exercise it you are treated the same as the settlor of a revocable trust as to the property subject to that power. So a beneficiary with a right to pull out a share is exposed on that share while the right is open. Then paragraph (2)(b) softens the aftermath: once the power lapses, is released, or is waived, you are treated as the settlor only to the extent the value affected exceeds the greater of the federal five and five amount or the annual gift tax exclusion figure, doubled if the donor was married at the time. That is why trusts holding withdrawal rights, including many life insurance trusts, are drafted around those numbers rather than by instinct.
Common Situations
The living trust that was sold as a shield. A retired contractor in Naples set up a revocable trust years ago and believes it puts his savings out of reach of a claim from an old project. It does not, and paragraph (1)(a) is why. The useful conversation is a different one. His homestead is already protected by the Florida Constitution, his annuity may be exempt by statute, and his retirement accounts are covered by another. He has more protection than he thought, from places he was not looking, and none of it is the trust.
The physician thinking about an offshore structure. A surgeon with real exposure is being quoted a substantial fee for a foreign trust. Before that decision, the questions worth answering are whether a claim already exists, what the homestead and exemptions already cover, whether entireties ownership fits the family, and whether the practice entity is doing its job. If a sophisticated structure still makes sense after that, at least it is being built on top of the protection that a Florida court is going to apply first rather than instead of it. See asset protection for physicians.
The parents leaving money to a son with exposure. A couple in Sarasota want to protect an inheritance from their son’s creditors. This is the one everyone gets backwards. They cannot protect their own assets by putting them in a trust for themselves, but they can protect his inheritance almost completely by leaving it to him in a discretionary trust with a spendthrift clause instead of outright. That is ordinary estate planning, it costs a fraction of what the exotic version costs, and it works because someone else is the settlor.
Sources of Law
- Fla. Stat. §736.0505 (creditors’ claims against settlor: paragraph (1)(a) revocable trusts, with the exemption qualifier; paragraph (1)(b) irrevocable trusts and the maximum amount that can be distributed, with the multiple-settlor apportionment rule; paragraph (1)(c) the tax reimbursement carve-out; subsection (2) powers of withdrawal and the lapse thresholds by reference to IRC §§2041(b)(2), 2514(e), and 2503(b); subsection (3) the spousal trust deemed-contribution rule, subject to Fla. Stat. §726.105). Official text, Online Sunshine. History: s. 5, ch. 2006-217; s. 5, ch. 2010-122; s. 2, ch. 2022-101. (retrieved 2026-08-13)
- Menotte v. Brown (In re Brown), 303 F.3d 1261 (11th Cir. Aug. 28, 2002) (No. 01-16211). Quoted above at slip op. 7 and 8, from the official Eleventh Circuit slip opinion PDF; CourtListener mirror. Pin cites are slip opinion pages because the slip carries no reporter pagination; later courts pin the same discussion to 1265 to 1268. Reading note: this decision predates the Florida Trust Code and construes no section of chapter 736; it is the binding Eleventh Circuit statement of the Florida rule that §736.0505(1) later codified. It quotes the spendthrift definition from Croom v. Ocala Plumbing & Elec. Co., 57 So. 243, 244 (Fla. 1911), and italicizes “another” in that quotation, an emphasis we do not reproduce. A caution for anyone checking our work: a later opinion renders the first passage above as a compressed parenthetical that reads differently from the court’s own sentences. We quote the Eleventh Circuit from the Eleventh Circuit’s own file. (retrieved 2026-08-13)
- In re Nichols, 434 B.R. 906 (Bankr. M.D. Fla. Sept. 17, 2010). Quoted above at 909. CourtListener. Source caveat: no official slip opinion PDF was retrievable, so the text is a reporter-derived rendering carrying Bankruptcy Reporter star pagination, which supplies the pin cites. Applies §736.0505(1)(a) to a revocable trust the debtor funded for her own benefit and over which she retained complete control; the interest and the account were property of the bankruptcy estate. (retrieved 2026-08-13)
- Mehdipour v. Rensin (In re Rensin), 600 B.R. 870 (Bankr. S.D. Fla. May 3, 2019) (West Palm Beach Division). Quoted above at 880, 881, and 882. CourtListener. Source caveat: no official slip opinion PDF was retrievable, so the text is a reporter-derived rendering carrying Bankruptcy Reporter star pagination, which supplies the pin cites; that rendering prints currency with a space after the sign, so the dollar figures on this page are stated in our own words rather than quoted. Status: a bankruptcy court ruling on cross-motions for summary judgment, persuasive rather than binding. We located no appeal or subsequent history for it in CourtListener or on the open web, and no citator pass was run, so the absence of a negative treatment note is not a clean bill of health. The opinion also applied Fla. Stat. §736.0107 and the public policy analysis in In re Brown, addressed the debtor’s homestead claim under 11 U.S.C. §§522(o) and 522(p), and expressly declined to grant enforceable relief as to the trust assets because the foreign trustee was not a party. (retrieved 2026-08-13)
- Related sections referenced above: Fla. Stat. §736.0504 (discretionary trusts, the mirror-image rule for a trust somebody else created for you); §736.0107 (governing law); §726.105 (transfers fraudulent as to present and future creditors, which §736.0505(3) is expressly subject to); §222.14 (exemption of annuity contract proceeds, the provision that protected the debtor’s payment stream in the 2019 case). (retrieved 2026-08-13)
- Gap note, stated for the record: we located no Florida state appellate decision construing §736.0505, and this page says so rather than implying the section is unsettled everywhere. Its law comes from the federal decisions above. Coverage of bankruptcy court opinions in public databases is incomplete, so those are the decisions we located rather than a complete census. A later decision, state or federal, could change any of this.
- Quotation note: the passages above reproduce the courts’ own published words, the Legislature’s own statutory text, and, where the court itself quoted it, the official comment to the Uniform Trust Code as reproduced in the opinion. 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 timing of transfers, and the record in each case, and nothing here predicts a result or promises that any particular structure will or will not protect anything.
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 736.0505 reaches a particular trust depends on that trust’s own terms, who funded it, who can benefit from it, and when it was funded relative to any claim, all of which we review at a free consult. Please do not send confidential details until we have connected.