Living Trust Lawyer
It’s never too early to begin estate planning for the legacy you will leave behind when you pass away, giving you and your family peace of mind. At Jordan & White, LLC, a living trust lawyer can help your family avoid probate when you create a living trust.
What Is a Living Trust?
A living trust is any trust you make while alive.
Many people create trusts to avoid probate after death. These kinds of trusts allow you to name real estate, life insurance policies, homes, and other assets to your beneficiaries while avoiding probate after you pass away. Probate can take months, sometimes even longer for large estates. Normally, your beneficiaries must wait for probate to conclude before receiving their inheritances.
Your living trust lawyer can help you decide the best type of trust for you, including:
- Revocable living trusts
- Irrevocable living trusts
- Irrevocable life insurance trusts (ILITs)
- Special needs trusts
- Medicaid protection trusts
- Generation-skipping trusts
Reasons To Create a Living Trust
A living trust can be revocable, allowing you to alter or cancel the trust, or irrevocable, barring you from making changes to the trust after creating and funding it.
An example of the latter is an irrevocable life insurance trust, which can control how a life insurance policy disburses to beneficiaries to take advantage of tax limitations at the cost of ownership of the policy. You must name the trust as the policy owner, meaning you can no longer borrow against the policy’s value.
Irrevocable trusts offer asset protection while you are alive. By contrast, revocable trusts do not protect assets but offer flexibility for moving assets into and out of the trust. For example, you could put your home into a trust at 60 for your children to inherit. At 70, you could win the lottery jackpot and may want to buy a larger home and sell your old home.
If you placed the home in an irrevocable trust, you might not be able to sell it until after much difficulty. If you placed the home in a revocable trust, you could simply move the home out of the trust again to sell.
Upon passing away, your revocable trust will become irrevocable, at which time the trustee must begin the steps of administering the trust.
Other Legal Documents To Include in Your Estate Plan
Estate planning can be difficult. How do you know that you included everything? What if you gain more assets in the next ten years? What if you have health problems or become incapacitated?
Besides a living trust, make sure your estate plan contains these additional legal documents:
- A living will (advance healthcare directive)
- Durable power of attorney
- Healthcare power of attorney
- A last will and testament with a pour-over clause for assets not in the trust
Your Eastern Massachusetts Estate and Trust Lawyer
Proudly serving the North Shore of Massachusetts, the law firm at Jordan & White, LLC, has served east Massachusetts families for over ten years in estate planning and trust creation. Call us today at 978-744-2811 or contact us online to schedule an initial consultation with a living trust lawyer.
