To help our local community, we’re offering a free Estate Planning seminar at our law firm in Boca Raton, FL that covers living trusts. If you want to learn more about why living trusts can protect your assets, register below.
Understanding Florida Living Trusts
What we can offer youIt’s possible to manage your estate while you’re still alive with a legal document called a living trust. You might be familiar with wills but they don’t go into effect until after you pass on. It’s important to know the difference between wills and trusts.
A living trust is part of your overall estate plan and it’s something worth looking into especially if you’re trying to plan ahead to protect your life savings.
We run living trust workshops specifically to help people protect their estates from a variety of issues including probate court, estate tax, divorces and nursing home bills. If you’d like to come to our next workshop, register below.
Learn more about living trusts before signing up for our workshop:
What is a Living Trust?
A living trust (also known as “inter vivos trust) is legal document where the trustee can hold property for a designated beneficiary. Similar to a trust fund, a living trust specifically designates what happens to all the property held in the trust after the trustee or original owner passes on.
Most property with value can be placed into the trust.
Some common examples of items that can be in a living trust include:
- Homes
- Bank accounts
- Art or Jewelry
- Cars
How Does a Living Trust Work?
When a trust is created the person who owns the property going into the trust is known as the grantor and they transfer the ownership of the items to the trust.
If the grantor has a house and collectible car then the deed and title of both assets no longer belong to the grantor but are owned by the trust. The process of moving ownership from the grantor to the trust is called “funding the trust”.
A trustee (someone that’s not the grantor) is then designated to carry out the wishes of the grantor after they have passed. The living trust also designates beneficiaries to inherit the assets in the trust when the grantor dies. The grantor has the ability to place conditions and restrictions on when the beneficiaries receive their inheritance.
Do I Need a Living Trust?
Some estates can get by without a living trust but there are key benefits to creating one. The first is avoiding court and all the costs associated with it. A will needs to go through probate while a living trust doesn’t. The second key benefit is privacy. A living trust is not a public document, doesn’t have to go to court and is generally more difficult to challenge.
If you want more control over the distributions of your assets after your passing then a living trust is something you should consider. We go over this and a lot more information in greater detail during our live workshops.
Check out the details below to learn more about our virtual living trust seminars to properly protect your estate.
Free Living Trust Seminar
Every month we host a free Estate Planning seminar to help make sure families are properly protected even if they already have a trust. Here’s what we cover…
Learn how a properly designed and maintained living trust estate plan can protect you from:
- Forcing your family though court if you (or your parents) are disabled.
- Forcing your family through court if you (or your parents) die.
- Falling prey to the uncertainty of the new “temporary”estate tax law.
- Losing an inheritance to predators who want to take it away (divorcing spouses, lawsuits, creditors, government agencies and the IRS)
- Allowing HIPAA to sabotage the estate plan.
- Failing to assure that beneficiaries take advantage of maximum income tax “stretch out”of IRAs and company retirement plans.
- Failing to help you and your family from being wiped out by nursing care bills.
To help our local community, we’re offering a free estate planning seminar at our Boca Raton location that covers living trusts. If you want to learn more about why living trusts can protect your assets, register for our next seminar below.