Living Trusts
Introduction: Protecting your Family, Home, and Future….
Many people think that only the wealthy can benefit from a living trust, but the truth is that anyone that owns a home or has an estate in excess of $100,000 can benefit from a living trust.
What is a Living Trust?
- A Living Trust is a written legal document, usually drafted by an estate planning attorney, which creates a separate entity. With a Living Trust, your assets (real estate, stocks, bank accounts, pensions, for example) are put into the Trust. These assets are used for your benefit during your lifetime, and then transferred to your beneficiaries when you die.
- A Living Trust is simply a trust you create while you’re alive, rather than one that is created at your death.
Who needs a Living Trust?
- Anyone who owns real estate or assets greater than $100,000 can benefit from a Living Trust.
- If you are married with children, you owe it to your family to ensure that your hard earned wealth is preserved.
What are the advantages of having a Living Trust?
- The biggest advantage of a Living Trusts is that assets left in the Trust avoid probate, since they are completely private. Because a trust is recognized as a separate legal entity, a Trustee can make distributions to named beneficiaries without any involvement from the courts. However, probate is a public process in which any interested party is allowed to look at your probate file and see all your personal details.
- Probate is court-supervised process of paying your debts and distributing your property to the people who inherit it. Because of court and lawyer fees associated with probate, cost of probate is often far greater than the cost of setting up a Living Trust.
- The average probate process can take months or even years, and assets in probate are not readily accessible to the beneficiaries. Because the courts have no control over assets placed in a Living Trust, these assets are not tied up in a lengthy (and costly) probate process. The Trustee simply distributes assets to named heirs, but only if those assets have actually been placed inside the Trust.
How are my assets put into the Living Trust?
- Almost anything can be placed into the Trust such as personal property, bonds, stocks, bank accounts, life insurance, and real estate.
- Transferring assets to your trust, also know as “funding” the trust, you simply change the name or title on your assets to the name of your Trust.
Who should draft a Living Trust for me?
- According to the State Bar of California, a qualified estate planning attorney should prepare your Living Trust.
- An estate plan created by someone who is not a qualified attorney can have costly and enormous consequences for your estate.
At The Law Offices of Richard C. Ng, trusts and estate planning is our specialty.
Please give us a call today to set up a FREE initial consultation. |
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