Made, Not Opened.

Loumpos v. Bank One, No. SC2024-1256 (Fla. Dec. 11, 2025) (Canady, J.), slip op. at 1–3, 23. The decision was on review of a certified direct conflict from the Second District, Case No. 2D2022-3908 (Pinellas County). The slip opinion is marked “NOT FINAL UNTIL TIME EXPIRES TO FILE REHEARING MOTION AND, IF FILED, DETERMINED”; secondary sources report the decision at 423 So. 3d 856 (Fla. 2025).

For Florida families, that is a meaningful clarification of a rule that had split the district courts of appeal for three years. For anyone building a structure meant to last, the more useful reading of Loumpos runs in the other direction: it is a case study in how much weight a family had unknowingly placed on a single contested sentence of statutory text, and how long it took to find out whether the weight would hold.

A default judgment was entered against Linda Loumpos in 2003. She later married Peter Maragoudakis. In February 2017, Peter opened a bank account in his name only. A few months later, the couple executed new signature cards stating that the account belonged to “Peter Maragoudakis & Linda Maragoudakis, Ten by Enty,” and checked the “Joint Tenants by Entirety” box on the card. Peter’s wages were the only monies ever deposited into the account. Loumpos, slip op. at 10 (quoting Loumpos v. Bank One, 392 So. 3d 841, 842–43 (Fla. 2d DCA 2024)).

The 2003 judgment was eventually assigned to Dove Investment Corp., which moved to garnish the account. Linda claimed the entireties exemption, on the ground that the debt was hers alone. Dove’s answer was technical and, under existing law, strong: because Linda’s name was not on the account when it was opened, the unities of time and title were missing, and without them there could be no tenancy by the entireties. Id. slip op. at 10–11.

Linda did not dispute that the unities of time and title were absent. She argued instead that the express designation on the signature card ended the inquiry, and that the 2008 amendment to section 655.79(1) had made the common-law unities irrelevant for deposit accounts. Id. slip op. at 11 (quoting the Second District’s account of the petitioner’s arguments). The trial court rejected both arguments. The Second District affirmed, holding that “neither Beal Bank nor section 655.79(1) eliminated the common law requirement,” and certified conflict with the Fourth District’s contrary decision in Versace v. Uruven, LLC. Id. slip op. at 11–13 (quoting Loumpos, 392 So. 3d at 848, and certifying conflict with Versace v. Uruven, LLC, 348 So. 3d 610 (Fla. 4th DCA 2022)).

The Supreme Court split the question in half and gave a different answer to each half.

On Beal Bank, the Second District was right. Beal Bank, SSB v. Almand & Associates (2001) is the decision every Florida practitioner cites for the proposition that a presumption of entireties ownership attaches to a spousal bank account. But the Court pointed out what the 2001 opinion had actually said: every rephrased certified question in Beal Bank was framed on the express assumption that “the unities required to establish ownership as a tenancy by the entireties exist.” Id. slip op. at 4–5 (quoting Beal Bank, SSB v. Almand & Assocs., 780 So. 2d 45, 48–49 (Fla. 2001)) (emphasis in original). All the accounts in that case had been opened by both spouses. Beal Bank expressly declined to address an account established by one spouse and later amended to add the other, and expressly declined to discuss “whether unity of time should be omitted from the list of tenancy by the entireties requirements.” Id. slip op. at 5, 14–15 (citing Beal Bank, 780 So. 2d at 49 n.2, 52 n.6). The Fourth District in Versace had read Beal Bank’s statement that an express entireties designation “ends the inquiry” as resolving the ownership question outright; the Supreme Court held that the sentence was “plainly penned in the same context as the rest of the opinion, which focused on determining the intent of the spouses.” Id. slip op. at 15 (quoting Beal Bank, 780 So. 2d at 60, which in turn cited First Nat’l Bank v. Hector Supply Co., 254 So. 2d 777, 781 (Fla. 1971)). On that point, “Loumpos correctly distinguished Beal Bank.” Id. slip op. at 15.

On the statute, the Second District was wrong. In 2008 the legislature added one sentence to section 655.79(1):

The sentence is quoted at id. slip op. at 9; the Court noted that section 655.79 has not been amended since 2008. Id. slip op. at 3 n.2. The Court’s reasoning turned on the word “made” and on the disjunctive phrase preceding it. Dove had argued from dictionary definitions and the past tense that an account is “made” only at the moment it is brought into existence. The Court answered that this reading “wholly ignores ‘[a]ny deposit . . . made,’ language that clearly contemplates more than just initial account creation.” Id. slip op. at 18. Reading the sentence in the full context of section 655.79 confirmed it: the first sentence of subsection (1) refers to a contract, agreement or signature card executed “in connection with the opening or maintenance of an account,” which likewise looks past inception. Id. slip op. at 19–20 (quoting § 655.79(1), Fla. Stat.) (emphasis in original).

The Court then supplied the structural argument that makes the holding difficult to confine. A tenancy by the entireties and a joint tenancy with right of survivorship share every characteristic and unity except the unity of marriage; a tenancy by the entireties therefore necessarily satisfies the definition of a joint tenancy. If the first sentence of subsection (1) renders the unities of time and title irrelevant for joint tenancies — as the Second District itself accepted — “then it strains reason to conclude that the legislature’s addition of the second sentence nevertheless requires an examination into the unities of time and title with respect to tenancies by the entireties.” Id. slip op. at 22; see also id. slip op. at 6 (setting out the six characteristics of a tenancy by the entireties as stated in Beal Bank, 780 So. 2d at 52: unity of possession, unity of interest, unity of title, unity of time, survivorship, and unity of marriage).

The Court also dispatched the interpretive canon the Second District had leaned on. The presumption against statutory change in the common law “provides no ‘reason to reject a fair reading [of a statute] that changes the common law,’” and “courts should not manufacture ambiguity to defeat such a fair reading.” Id. slip op. at 17–18 (quoting Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 318 (2012), as quoted in Peoples Gas Sys. v. Posen Constr., Inc., 322 So. 3d 604, 611 (Fla. 2021)).

Holding: section 655.79 authorises a joint spousal bank account to be held as a tenancy by the entireties even if the account was originally established by one spouse. The Second District’s decision was quashed and Versace approved to the extent consistent. Id. slip op. at 23. Chief Justice Muñiz and Justices Labarga, Couriel, Grosshans, Francis and Sasso all concurred in Justice Canady’s opinion.

It is worth being precise about the boundaries, because a holding this clean invites over-reading.

The unity of marriage still matters, and it is the only unity the statute cannot dispense with. The whole structural argument depends on marriage being the single distinguishing feature. Divorce severs it, and the account converts.

The presumption is still rebuttable, and still defeasible in writing. Section 655.79(1) applies “unless otherwise specified in writing,” and subsection (2) provides that the presumption “may be overcome only by proof of fraud or undue influence or clear and convincing proof of a contrary intent.” § 655.79(1)–(2), Fla. Stat., quoted at id. slip op. at 9–10, 20. The practical trap here is not the family’s — it is the institution’s. An account agreement that expressly disclaims entireties ownership will defeat the presumption, and that disclaimer may sit in boilerplate the depositors never read.

The holding is about deposit accounts. Section 655.79 is a banking statute. Brokerage accounts, closely held interests and other personalty are not governed by its text, and the common-law analysis continues to apply to them. This is where Loumpos and the cases on entireties ownership of LLC interests sit in different rooms of the same house: the LLC line turns on the four corners of an operating agreement and, in at least one recent decision, on which state’s law gets to characterise the ownership at all. Nothing in Loumpos speaks to that.

Entireties protection has never worked against a joint creditor, and it does not work against the federal government in the same way. Property held by the entireties is beyond the reach of a creditor of one spouse. A creditor of both reaches it. And under United States v. Craft, a federal tax lien attaches to a delinquent taxpayer’s interest in entireties property notwithstanding state law to the contrary. United States v. Craft, 535 U.S. 274 (2002); see also Alper Law, “Loumpos v. Bank One” (collecting Craft and subsequent Florida applications of Loumpos, including In re White, 2026 WL 296894 (Bankr. M.D. Fla. Feb. 4, 2026)). A family whose exposure is a tax liability or a jointly signed guaranty has no entireties defence at all.

Linda Loumpos won. It is worth counting what winning cost, and on what it depended.

The judgment was entered in 2003. The signature cards were executed in October 2017. The Supreme Court answered the question in December 2025. For the whole of that period, whether the account was reachable depended on an unresolved question of statutory construction that the district courts of appeal had answered in opposite directions, that federal courts applying Florida law had also answered in the negative (see In re Benzaquen, 555 B.R. 63, 67 (Bankr. S.D. Fla. 2016) (concluding that the 2008 addition to § 655.79(1) “does not change the required six unities”), discussed at Loumpos, slip op. at 21), and that required a certified conflict to settle. If Dove had won, the money would have been gone. The outcome was decided by a reading of the word “made.”

That is not planning. It is a coin that took twenty-two years to land.

And there is a second feature of these facts that is easy to skip past. The money in that account was never Linda’s. Peter’s wages were the only deposits. Adding her name to an account funded entirely by her husband moved value toward the debtor, not away from her creditor — which is why the case was fought over the unities rather than over anything else.

Reverse the facts and the analysis changes completely. Where a spouse with an existing or foreseeable claim moves her own funds into an entireties account, the creditor’s better argument is not that the unities are missing. It is that the retitling was a transfer of the debtor’s separate property, made to an insider, after the claim arose — the classic pattern that Florida’s voidable-transfer statute exists to address. Ch. 726, Fla. Stat. (Florida Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act). Whether any particular retitling is a voidable transfer depends on whose funds were moved, the timing relative to the claim, the transferor’s solvency and the surrounding facts. The Loumpos opinion addresses only the characterisation of the account under § 655.79 and does not discuss voidable-transfer law; the point made here is that the two questions are independent, not that any such claim was available on these facts. Loumpos removes a technical defence to entireties characterisation. It does not, and could not, insulate a transfer from that separate body of law, and the opinion does not purport to; the record before the Court did not present the question.

That distinction is the whole lesson. Entireties protection is at its strongest where it is incidental — where a married couple has held ordinary joint accounts for years, funded from ordinary income, long before anyone was owed anything. It is at its weakest precisely where someone reaches for it on purpose, because reaching for it on purpose generates a date, a motive, and a transfer.

Three things are worth carrying out of this case into how structures are actually built.

First, single-layer protection is fragile protection, however good the layer. The entireties defence here had to carry the entire weight of the outcome, and it nearly failed on a technicality unrelated to its merits. A structure that places a seasoned, irrevocable, discretionary trust between the family and the asset — administered by a trustee who is genuinely independent — does not need to win a conflicts argument or a canon-of-construction argument, because a creditor’s best case ends somewhere well short of the asset.

Second, incidental protection beats deliberate protection, and the reason is evidentiary. The features of the Loumpos account that made it defensible were the features nobody engineered: a long marriage, a single funding source, no relationship between the account’s arrangement and the debt. Protection built years before any claim has that same quality. Protection assembled after a claim has the opposite one.

Third, the paperwork is the structure. The signature card was the document in this case — checked box, “Ten by Enty,” two names. Had the bank’s account agreement contained an express entireties disclaimer, the presumption would have been defeated and the result likely reversed, whatever the couple intended. Account titling, beneficiary designations and signature cards deserve the same review as the trust instrument, because they are frequently the operative instrument in fact.

Loumpos is a good decision. It reads the statute the legislature wrote, resolves a real conflict, and gives Florida families a clearer rule than they had: an account retitled into both spouses’ names can be an entireties account, and the absence of the unities of time and title will not defeat it.

But a rule confirmed after eight years of litigation is a rule that was not available when it was needed. The families who never had to find out are the ones whose protection did not depend on a single word in a single sentence — whose structures were seasoned, irrevocable, independently administered, and settled long before any creditor had a reason to read their signature cards.

This note is general commentary on a published decision and is not legal advice for any particular person or matter. Tenancy by the entireties, account titling and creditor exemptions vary substantially by state and turn on specific facts, account documents and the character of the debt; anyone with a concrete question should take advice from qualified counsel in the relevant jurisdiction.