Designed to provide more privacy and legal protection than wills do, that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the ins, outs, and advantages of living trusts. Understanding what this document is and how it works can help you determine if it’s the right option for you. Learn the basics.
Trusts are powerful and versatile legal entities, allowing for asset protection, the elimination of conflicts of interest, minimizing tax liabilities, and the quick distribution of wealth before and after death. Yet to perform any of these functions, trusts must be written and managed in a certain way. There is a lot that goes into developing …
Trusts can be a very versatile and powerful tool. They allow us to designate beneficiaries and assign wealth to them in nearly any way, from monthly payouts to a conditional lump sum. But unlike most other estate planning documents, trusts are much more than just a document. The paperwork surrounding a trust establishes its existence …
A charitable remainder trust is a specially designed tax-exempt irrevocable living trust set up to host and hold appreciating assets, pay out income to its beneficiaries, and eventually donate the remainder of its contents to a charity of your choice. While the focus of a charitable remainder trust seems to be the giving to charity, …
Trusts can be a powerful estate planning tool. Among other things, trusts allow you to allocate assets for long-term investment to pay dividends for your children and grandchildren, protect certain assets and investments from creditors, minimize the tax impact of your death, and drastically simplify the distribution of your estate. But what if you want …
Trusts are not exclusive to the ultrarich but setting one up wisely may still require help from an estate planning professional. Even simple mistakes can end up costing your estate a fortune, and leave your family with much more stress and trouble than the whole thing might have been worth. Unlike simpler documents, trusts require …
Trustor vs trustee? Trust who? We all know what trust means, between trust funds and legal trusts and trust entities and trust documents, the world of estate planning and trust creation can become a little opaque. Thankfully, trusts themselves are not very complicated, and the difference between trustees and trustors is even less so. Understanding …
But transferring what we owned in life to our surviving kin in death is easier said than done. We cannot hold onto much of what we own after we die. Condos and homes aren’t the property of the dead, and beyond what we literally take into the grave, every material possession under our name must …
To understand how a trust should be built, you need to first understand what a living trust is, how funding a trust works, and why it’s important. A trust is only worth what you fund it with – so if you decide against funding a trust, it is effectively useless. Learn more about funding …
The trust litigation process is reserved for cases where the integrity of trust is in question. Like other examples of litigation, trust litigation requires thorough research and a lengthy, at times expensive discovery process to prove ill intent or wrongdoing and justify damages or some other compensation for the petitioner. There are times when trust …
A living trust is a unique estate planning tool because it effectively transfers ownership over specified assets and property to someone else through a third party, while giving the original owner a varying degree of control while the assets remain in the third party’s care. This is important in the context of estate planning at …