What are the best trusts to use for my estate plan?
Now at the outset, I will tell you that’s an impossible question to answer in a short video. The only way to get the proper answer is to sit down with an estate planning attorney, discuss your situation and your goals, and that’s how we will arrive at a proper answer as to what type of trust is best for you. Ultimately, what type is best is whatever your San Diego estate planning attorney recommends and shows you how they accomplish your goals.
Now on type, there’s dozens of different types of trusts. Whether they’re revocable (you can change them) or irrevocable (you can’t change them) and what the goal is. Are we passing things on to the kids according to our wishes? Or are we getting a tax advantage or creditor protection? Or are we providing for a spouse who’s not a U.S. citizen or an individual who has special needs? There’s a different type of trust for all of those scenarios, but even within the most common type of trust a revocable trust, a family trust, a living trust -it’s all the same type of trust. There’s a ton of different ways to customize it to fit your goals, but it all depends on what you want.
So for a married couple, what do we say happens when one spouse passes away? Does everything continue to be used by the surviving spouse without change, or do we split everything into to preserve half for the kids? How do we define incapacity? Is it your kids that are going to say you’re incapacitated or somebody else that you name? Or is it physicians? And then when we get to how things pass to the kids, do we distribute everything outright meaning it just comes out of the trust and goes to them and we say good luck. Or do we at least say we’re going to hold it until a certain age? Or do we say we’re going to hold it their whole lifetime to give him an added benefit of creditor protection and making sure that a nasty divorce doesn’t take away their inheritance? And if we do that, do we give them the key to the trust? Or do we avoid somebody else? The point being, there are an endless amount of ways to customize your estate plan with different types of trusts or even within an individual single type of trust and how to customize it to best fit your goals.
The only way for you to know what’s right for you is to sit down and have a conversation with an estate planning attorney in San Diego. Now if you have questions around what’s right for you always feel free to reach out and ask him by phone or email or of course set up a free consultation with our San Diego estate planning attorney and we’ll sit down and talk through your specifics.
Related post: 6 Reasons Why Working with an Estate Planning Attorney is Important
