8 Florida Exemptions That Protect You From a Personal Guarantee

These Rules Are About You, Not About Your Business

Start with the sentence nobody says out loud when a guarantee is being negotiated. Every exemption on this page belongs to a natural person. Your LLC has no homestead, your corporation has no wage protection, and your partnership cannot claim a vehicle allowance. When a funder sues the entity and takes a judgment against it, the operating account, the receivables, the trucks and the inventory are all fair game with none of these filters in front of them, which is exactly why the funder asked you to sign personally in the first place.

The list becomes relevant at a specific moment: after the guarantee has been called, after a judgment names you as an individual, and when a creditor starts looking at what you own outside the business. That is a different fight from defending the company, and it is one where Florida gives an individual more protection than almost any other state in the country. The homestead has no dollar ceiling, retirement money is exempt without a cap, and annuity and life insurance value is unusually well protected here.

Eight exemptions, ordered from the largest asset to the procedural step that makes any of them count, because an exemption nobody claims within the deadline is not an exemption. The final item is the one that gets lost most often.

1. The Homestead, With No Number Attached to It

Florida’s homestead protection sits in the constitution rather than in a statute, at Art. X, §4, and its distinguishing feature is the absence of a dollar figure anywhere in the text. A guarantor’s house is protected from forced sale whether it appraises at $310,000 or at $6,000,000, and the provision goes on to say that no judgment, decree or execution operates as a lien on it, which is a stronger result than an exemption that merely blocks a sale. The constraints are spatial and personal: contiguous land of one half acre inside a municipality or 160 acres outside one, ownership by a natural person rather than by an entity, actual residence, and an intent to keep the property as a permanent home.

Three obligations are carved out and a guarantee is not among them: property taxes and assessments, obligations contracted for the purchase, improvement or repair of the property, and obligations for house, field or other labor performed on the realty. Fla. Stat. §222.01 supplies the procedure for putting a recorded judgment to the test, and §222.02 through §222.04 handle designation and survey where acreage is genuinely in play. All of that is worked through at length on our dedicated page about how a personal guarantee lands against a Florida homestead, so it is compressed here.

One asymmetry matters for planning. The caps that do not exist in state court appear the moment a bankruptcy petition is filed. Florida opted out of the federal exemption scheme at Fla. Stat. §222.20, which triggers 11 U.S.C. §522(p), limiting to $214,000 the value of a homestead interest acquired within the 1,215 days before filing for cases filed on or after April 1, 2025, and 11 U.S.C. §522(o), which reduces the exemption by value moved into the residence within ten years with intent to hinder, delay or defraud a creditor. Section 522(b)(3)(A) also looks to where you were domiciled for the 730 days before filing.

2. Head-of-Family Earnings, and the Six Months After Deposit

Fla. Stat. §222.11 defines a head of family as any natural person providing more than one half of the support for a child or other dependent, and disposable earnings as what remains of earnings after deducting amounts required by law to be withheld. For a head of family, all disposable earnings at or under $750 a week are exempt from attachment or garnishment outright. Above that line the earnings remain exempt unless you agreed otherwise in writing, and the statute makes the waiver hard to obtain by accident: it must be in the same language as the contract, contained in a separate document attached to it, and printed in at least 14 point type, using a prescribed form signed by both sides.

The provision creditors underestimate is what happens after payday. Exempt earnings credited or deposited in a financial institution stay exempt from attachment or garnishment for six months after they are received, so long as the funds can be traced and identified, and the statute states that commingling with other money does not defeat traceability. A bank account holding six months of protected wages next to a modest amount of other money is not the easy target a collector assumes it is, but the tracing has to be done with statements rather than asserted.

Two limits are worth being honest about. If you are not a head of family, the state protection drops away and what remains are the federal restrictions on wage garnishment, which are far thinner. And distributions from your own company are not automatically wages: whether a draw, a distribution or a K-1 allocation counts as earnings for §222.11 depends on how you actually pay yourself, which is a question to settle with counsel before a writ is served rather than after.

3. The §222.25 List, and the $4,000 You Have to Choose

Fla. Stat. §222.25 carries four additional exemptions, all of them personal. Subsection (1) protects a debtor’s interest, not to exceed $5,000 in value, in a single motor vehicle. Subsection (2) exempts professionally prescribed health aids for the debtor or a dependent, with no dollar limit attached. Subsection (3) protects a refund or credit received or to be received under the earned income tax credit provision of the Internal Revenue Code, including traceable deposits of it in a financial institution, and excludes claims for child or spousal support.

The vehicle figure is an interest, which means equity rather than sticker value. A truck worth $28,000 with $26,000 still owed on it has $2,000 of equity and is entirely covered, while the same truck owned free and clear is exposed above $5,000. The number carries no inflation adjustment, which makes it a modest allowance by 2026 standards and a reason for any guarantor with a paid-off vehicle to know the figure before a levy rather than after. None of it reaches a vehicle titled to the business, which is ordinary company property under Fla. Stat. §56.061, with §55.205(5) supplying the mechanism for enforcing a judgment lien on vehicles and vessels through the state motor vehicle department on a court order.

Subsection (4) is the one that gets misread constantly. It exempts a debtor’s interest in personal property not exceeding $4,000, but only if the debtor does not claim or receive the benefits of a homestead exemption under Art. X, §4 of the State Constitution, and it too excludes support claims. That is an election, not an addition. A guarantor who rents, who lives in a home titled to a spouse alone, or whose residence holds no equity worth protecting can take the $4,000 and apply it to cash, tools, a second vehicle or personal effects.

Anyone sitting on real homestead equity would be trading an uncapped protection for a $4,000 one, which is almost never sensible. Because it is a choice rather than a default, it has to be made deliberately and in the right forum: the exemptions you assert in a sworn claim served on a garnishment and the ones you schedule in a bankruptcy case are separate acts with separate consequences, and taking inconsistent positions across the two creates a problem you do not want. Get a Florida attorney to make the call rather than guessing at it.

4. Retirement Money, Without a Ceiling

Fla. Stat. §222.21(2)(a) exempts from all claims of creditors any money or assets payable to an owner, participant or beneficiary from, and any interest of an owner, participant or beneficiary in, a fund or account maintained under Internal Revenue Code sections 401(a), 403(a), 403(b), 408, 408A, 409, 414, 457(b) or 501(a). Read the list against your own statements: it covers the profit-sharing plan, the 401(k), the SEP, the traditional and Roth individual retirement accounts, the 403(b) from a prior job and a governmental 457(b). There is no dollar cap anywhere in the provision.

Two extensions matter more than they sound like they should. Section 222.21(2)(c) provides that the exemption does not end at the owner’s death by reason of a direct transfer or eligible rollover into an inherited individual retirement account, and it protects an interest awarded or received in a transfer incident to divorce from the moment it is awarded. The statute states that the subsection is remedial and applies retroactively to inherited accounts and to divorce transfers regardless of when the account was created, which is unusual and helpful language.

What it does not do is protect money after you take it out. A distribution deposited into a checking account is an ordinary deposit, and the §222.21 shield does not follow it there in the way §222.11 follows exempt wages for six months. If a guarantee judgment is looming, the timing of any withdrawal is a decision to run past counsel first, because moving protected money into an unprotected account is a mistake that cannot be undone after a writ is served.

5. Annuities and Life Insurance Value, Which Florida Guards Hard

Fla. Stat. §222.14 is short and unusually broad. The cash surrender values of life insurance policies issued on the lives of citizens or residents of the state, and the proceeds of annuity contracts issued to citizens or residents of the state, are not in any case liable to attachment, garnishment or legal process in favor of any creditor of the person whose life is insured or of any creditor of the annuity beneficiary, unless the policy or contract was effected for the benefit of that creditor. No dollar cap, no waiting period in the text, and no distinction between a modest policy and a large one.

That combination makes Florida one of the friendlier states in the country on this asset class, and it is worth knowing which of your holdings actually qualify. A whole life or universal policy with accumulated cash value is squarely inside the provision. A term policy with no cash value has nothing to exempt. A commercial annuity issued to a Florida resident falls within it. A deferred compensation arrangement that merely resembles an annuity may not, and that is a question of what the contract is rather than what it is called.

The obvious temptation is the one to avoid. Buying an annuity or funding a policy with money a creditor is already chasing is the fact pattern Fla. Stat. §222.30 was written for, since it creates a cause of action for converting a non-exempt asset into an exempt one with intent to hinder, delay or defraud, and Fla. Stat. §222.29 removes an exemption entirely where it results from a fraudulent transfer under chapter 726. The protection is real for assets you already hold. It is not a place to move money to once a guarantee has been called.

6. Entireties Property, When Only One Signature Appears

Tenancy by the entireties is a form of ownership available only to a married couple, and its consequence for a guarantor is that property held that way cannot be executed against by a creditor of one spouse alone. Real property conveyed to a husband and wife carries a presumption of entireties ownership in Florida. Beal Bank, SSB v. Almand & Associates, 780 So. 2d 45 (Fla. 2001), carried that presumption over to bank accounts titled in both spouses’ names, provided the traditional unities exist and the signature card does not express a contrary intent.

Put that next to your funding file. Where a funder took a guarantee from one spouse only, a judgment on that guarantee does not reach the jointly titled residence, the joint brokerage account or the joint operating reserve you and your spouse hold together, because there is no divisible interest for a sheriff to sell. If a bankruptcy petition is later filed, 11 U.S.C. §522(b)(3)(B) preserves the same result by exempting an interest held as a tenant by the entirety so far as nonbankruptcy law puts it beyond process.

The ways it fails are worth memorizing. Both spouses signing the guarantee ends it, because the creditor is then a creditor of both. The presumption on an account is rebuttable, and a signature card that offered entireties and was not selected can defeat it. Divorce and the death of a spouse each change the ownership. And retitling assets into joint name after a default runs straight into the conversion problem described in the previous item.

7. College, Health and Disability Accounts Under §222.22

Fla. Stat. §222.22 protects a set of accounts that a business owner rarely thinks of as creditor-proof. Subsection (1) covers moneys paid into or out of, the assets of, and the income of any validly existing qualified tuition program authorized by section 529 of the Internal Revenue Code, and it names Florida Prepaid College Trust Fund advance payment contracts and participation agreements specifically. Subsection (2) does the same for a health savings account or medical savings account authorized under sections 220 and 223. Subsection (3) covers a Coverdell education savings account under section 530, subsection (4) covers a hurricane savings account where federal tax-exempt status has been granted, and subsection (5) covers a qualified ABLE program under section 529A, subject to an exception referenced at Fla. Stat. §1009.986(7).

This matters because of what business owners actually do under pressure. The college fund is very often the largest liquid asset a guarantor holds outside a retirement plan, and it is the first thing people offer to cash out when a funder’s collector starts describing what a judgment will do. The statute reaches not only the balance but moneys paid into or out of the account and the income of it, which is broad language, and the Florida Prepaid contract is named rather than left to inference.

Two boundaries. The protection follows the account, not the money after it leaves for a non-qualified purpose, so liquidating a 529 to fund a settlement converts protected value into ordinary cash the moment it lands in your checking account. And building one of these up while a guarantee is being enforced is the same conversion problem that runs through this whole chapter, addressed at Fla. Stat. §222.29 and §222.30. Contributions made in the ordinary course years before a default look nothing like contributions made the month after a demand letter.

8. The Sworn Claim You Have Twenty Days to File

None of the seven items above operate automatically against a writ. Fla. Stat. §77.041 opens with the condition that decides who gets the process at all: upon application for a writ of garnishment by a plaintiff, if the defendant is an individual, the clerk of the court attaches a Notice to Defendant to the writ. That notice sets out the categories of exempt wages and property and tells you to file a sworn claim of exemption within 20 days after you receive it or risk losing important rights. A corporate or LLC defendant receives no such notice, because the statute never reaches it.

The filing is a notarized claim of exemption together with a request for hearing, and once it is filed the statute directs that a hearing be held as soon as is practicable to decide the validity of what you claimed. There is a deadline on the other side as well: if the plaintiff does not respond within the period the statute allows, which is 8 business days where the claim was hand delivered and 14 where it was mailed, no hearing is required and the clerk must automatically dissolve the writ and notify the parties. Plaintiffs miss that window more often than you would expect.

Two related clocks run at the same time and should be calendared together. Under Fla. Stat. §77.055 the plaintiff serves the garnishee’s answer and a notice within 5 days, and under §77.07(2) you have 20 days from the date on that certificate of service to move to dissolve the writ on the ground that an allegation in the motion for the writ is untrue. Between those and the §77.04 requirement that the garnishee answer within 20 days of service, the entire contest happens inside about a month, which is why the day the notice arrives is the day to call a lawyer rather than a bank branch.

What This List Does Nothing About

It does nothing for the business. The receivables your funder claimed in a UCC-1, the operating account, the equipment, the inventory and any real estate titled to the company are all reachable on a judgment against the entity with none of these provisions in the way, and the garnishment of a corporate account never even generates the §77.041 notice. Anyone telling you that Florida’s exemptions will protect your company has confused two different bodies of law.

It also does nothing to reduce the judgment. A guarantee judgment against you personally accrues interest at the rate the Chief Financial Officer sets quarterly under Fla. Stat. §55.03, which is 8.06 percent per year for the quarter beginning July 1, 2026, and it readjusts every January 1 until paid. It sits on the public record, it can support a real property lien on any non-homestead parcel you own under §55.10, and it will surface the next time you refinance, sell or apply for credit. Exemptions decide what a creditor can take, not what you owe.

And it does nothing if you build it after the fact. Fla. Stat. §222.29 provides that a chapter 222 exemption is not effective where it results from a fraudulent transfer or conveyance under chapter 726, and §222.30 creates a separate action for a fraudulent asset conversion, meaning any change or disposition of an asset that makes the proceeds exempt, made with intent to hinder, delay or defraud, with remedies including avoidance, attachment, injunction and levy on the converted asset or its proceeds. In a bankruptcy case, 11 U.S.C. §522(o) looks back a full ten years on the same conduct. The protections here are for what you already own.

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