In re Caliri Case Analysis

In In re Caliri, 347 B.R. 788 (Bankr. M.D. Fla. 2006), the bankruptcy court found that bank accounts opened before the couple’s wedding and jet skis carrying “or” titles were not entireties property. The court allowed the exemption for the couple’s federally documented catamaran and found the debtor’s half interest in the accounts and the jet skis to be non-exempt property of the bankruptcy estate.

The decision turned on title paperwork and its dates. The Beal Bank v. Almand entireties presumption protects marital personal property only where the marriage and the title line up and no statute prescribes the ownership form. The couple lost two categories of assets on documents signed at the wrong time or with the wrong word, and kept the most valuable one.

The Exemptions the Trustee Challenged

Elizabeth Ann Caliri filed chapter 7 bankruptcy in October 2005 and claimed nearly all of her scheduled property as exempt tenancy by the entireties property owned with her non-filing husband, citing the Florida Supreme Court’s Beal Bank decision. Her schedules claimed four parcels of real property, several bank accounts, room-by-room household furnishings, two jet skis, and an $80,000 catamaran.

The chapter 7 trustee objected, then withdrew his objections to the real property and to several other items of personal property. Five disputes remained: two Bank of America accounts, both jet skis, the catamaran, and a $150 checking account claimed under Florida’s constitutional personal property exemption.

The $150 exemption claim failed for want of particularity. The debtor had listed three separate accounts as nothing more than “Checking: Bank of America,” with no account numbers, and never responded to the objection. A debtor must describe claimed exemptions precisely enough that every party can identify the assets she claims. The court quoted the line that “exempting property is not a game of hide and seek.”

Accounts Opened Before the Marriage

An account opened before a couple’s wedding lacks the unity of marriage, because ownership of a financial account is fixed on the date the account is established.

The Caliris opened both Bank of America accounts in early 2003, the first that February and the second that March, and married on April 19, 2003. The first account was titled in the husband’s name and the debtor’s maiden name. Its signature card offered three checkbox choices, “Individual,” “Joint Account with Survivorship,” and “Tenants by Entireties (Spouses Only),” and no box was checked. On the second account the couple checked “Joint Account with Survivorship.”

Florida requires six unities for an entireties estate: possession, interest, title, time, survivorship, and marriage. The marriage unity means the parties must be married at the time the property became titled in their joint names. Beal Bank fixes that moment for a financial account as the day the account is opened. Entireties ownership of accounts the Caliris opened as an unmarried couple “was a legal impossibility,” and the court never needed to weigh the survivorship election on the second account.

Florida law offered one cure. The court cited In re Kossow: spouses can convert a premarital interest into entireties ownership with an assignment executed after the wedding. The Caliris never executed one. The debtor’s half of each balance, $10,681.91 from the larger account and $119.65 from the smaller, became property of the estate.

Jet Skis Titled With “Or”

A Florida-titled vessel registered to spouses with “or” between their names is a joint tenancy, not entireties property, no matter what the couple intended.

The Caliris bought two Yamaha jet skis for $3,500 in February 2005, during the marriage. Both state certificates of title read “Philip R Caliri Jr OR Elizabeth A Caliri,” and the couple never transferred or assigned their interests afterward. Under Florida’s vessel titling statute, “or” between co-owners’ names creates a joint tenancy “even if the co-owners are husband and wife,” and entireties ownership requires the word “and” on the title. The rule sits today in section 328.01(7)(d) of the Florida Statutes, and section 319.22 states the same rule for motor vehicles.

The Beal Bank presumption could not save the exemption. A presumption of entireties ownership must yield to any statute that specifically prescribes how ownership of a given type of property is created. The court took that rule from In re Daniels, which applied the vehicle titling statute to a car titled with the word “or” and found a joint tenancy. The court in In re Wingate had reached the same result for a boat and vehicles titled in the “husband or wife” form. The debtor’s half interest in each jet ski went to the estate.

The Federally Documented Catamaran

A federally documented vessel is not titled by the State of Florida, so the titling statute that defeated the jet skis did not apply to the Caliris’ catamaran.

The couple bought the 2002 Baja Cruiser catamaran in March 2005 and claimed it exempt at $80,000, by far the largest asset in dispute. The Coast Guard issued a Certificate of Documentation naming both spouses as owners without stating a form of ownership. A documented vessel needs no Florida title, and no federal statute governs who owns one, so ownership fell to Florida case law, Beal Bank and Daniels, rather than to any titling statute.

The Bill of Sale described the buyers as “Philip R. Caliri, Jr. and Elizabeth A. Caliri Joint tenants with right of survivorship” in its names paragraph. The ownership-selection paragraph offered checkboxes for joint tenancy, tenancy by the entireties, community property, and other, and no box was checked. Under Beal Bank, expressly selecting another ownership form from paperwork that offers an entireties option is an express disclaimer. The court found it unclear whether the couple had expressly disclaimed anything: they were married when they bought the boat, and the federal documentation named them both.

With no governing statute and an ambiguous record, the scales tipped in the debtor’s favor. Beal Bank favors entireties ownership of property a married couple owns absent an express disclaimer, so the court found that the couple owned the catamaran as tenants by the entireties and allowed the $80,000 exemption.

How Later Courts Have Applied Caliri

A federal district court cited Caliri for the same tie-breaking rule in Mathews v. Cohen, 382 B.R. 526 (M.D. Fla. 2007): where uncertainty exists about whether spouses expressly disclaimed entireties ownership, the scales tip toward the debtor.

In Mathews, a bankruptcy court had found an express disclaimer because a couple selected joint tenancy on stock registration instructions. The district court found that conclusion erroneous and remanded: selecting another ownership form is an express disclaimer only where the paperwork affirmatively offered a tenancy by the entireties option, and the stock documents offered none. The court also noted, citing Beal Bank, that “or” in a stock certificate’s title is not dispositive. The conjunction controls only where a titling statute makes it control, as with cars and state-titled vessels.

One boundary has moved since 2006 for bank accounts. Florida’s deposit-account statute creates an entireties presumption that missing unities of time and title do not defeat, as the Florida Supreme Court construed it in Loumpos v. Bank One (Fla. 2025). A joint spousal account no longer fails merely because one spouse opened it first and added the other later.

The Loumpos account was opened by one spouse alone and later re-titled with an express entireties designation; the decision says nothing about a couple who opened an account together before their wedding and never changed it. The statute reaches only deposit accounts, so the jet-ski and catamaran holdings stand untouched.

Titling Marital Property After Caliri

The three titling disputes in Caliri were each decided by a document, not by the couple’s intent. Three rules follow for married couples relying on entireties protection in Florida.

A tenancy by the entireties account is safest when the designation is on the signature card from the day the account opens. The cure for an account that predates the marriage or the designation is a new account with the entireties box checked and the balance moved into it. An assignment executed after the marriage can convert a premarital interest, but the Caliris’ accounts were lost because no such assignment ever existed.

For cars, boats, and jet skis titled by the state, the single word on the certificate controls: “and” preserves the possibility of entireties ownership, and “or” forecloses it. For a federally documented vessel, no titling statute applies, and the presumption protects a married couple’s boat unless a purchase or documentation paper expressly disclaims entireties ownership. An express entireties designation in the purchase documents removes the ambiguity the Caliris had to litigate.

The presumption Caliri applied comes from Beal Bank v. Almand, and for bank accounts the statutory presumption construed in Loumpos v. Bank One now governs the ownership inquiry. Caliri sits with the other Florida tenancy by the entireties decisions in the Florida asset protection case law that bankruptcy courts apply as Florida law.

Jonathan Alper of Alper Law represented the debtor in this case.