“10 years ago my husband and I divorced. per the divorce decree he was to “maintain” an insurance policy that was in affect. He did NOT, so I made the monthly premiums myself. He is now deceased and his estate is being entered into probate. Will a ’statue of limitations’ prevent me from collecting from his estate the premiums I paid? Hope you can give me some information.”

There are a couple of different ways to look at this. If this is treated like a written contract, then the statute of limitations begins to run when he first did not make a payment, and the staute will in all probability have already run. If we look at it like an installment contract, then each premium not paid was its own cause of action, and some of the payments would then not be time-barred by the statute of limitations.

Had you gone back to family court when he was alive, he could have been found in contempt of the Court order and a mechanism for payment could have been set up. It’s a little late for that. Statutes of limitations exist so that people do not sleep on their rights and many years later jump up and yell “gotcha!” Sometimes when a person sets a trap, he’s the one that falls into it.