What To Expect When Using A Revocable Living Trusts
Are you trying to come up with an estate plan for dividing your assets after you pass away? If so, consider using a revocable living trust in order to get this job done. Here is what to expect about this type of financial planning document that can make things easier for everyone involved.
Expect To Pay More To Set Everything Up
The nature of a will is quite simple, since it is a simple document where you only really make a few key decisions for the document to be created. This means that the process is cheap from a legal standpoint, which makes it appealing to people that are coming up with an estate plan. However, a revocable living trust is much more complicated with a will, which can cause the cost of setting up the trust to be more money.
While this may make it sound like a will is the better way to go, you must think about all the costs after you pass away. Your loved ones will then need to pay for a lawyer to go through the probate process, which could be even more expensive based on the size of your estate.
Expect To Take More Time To Think Things Out
A will is a simplified state planning document that does not take much time to create because your options are quite limited. However, a revocable living trust gives you many more options, which means the amount of decisions you will need to make are greater. Expect to take more time to think about all your decisions, since you can do things that you cannot normally do with a will. For example, a revocable living trust gives you the choice to require over signs of the assets in your estate, set conditions on how assets are distributed, and requires you to pick a person to enforce those decisions.
Expect To Avoid Probate
The biggest advantage of using a revocable living trust is that you will completely avoid probate. This is because the assets belong to the trust as soon as they go into them, which is before and after you pass away. There is no need to go through the legal process of probate to transfer assets from one person to another. Assets belong to the trust until the trust is dissolved or there are no longer assets in the trust for it to exist anymore.
For more information on how to deal with a living trust, talk to a local trust attorney today.
Share