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If you are like many homeowners, your home is likely your family’s most valuable and treasured asset. In light of this, you want to plan wisely to ensure your home will pass to your heirs in the most efficient and safe manner possible when you die or in the event you become incapacitated by illness or injury.

Indeed, proper estate planning is as much a part of responsible homeownership as having homeowners insurance or keeping your home’s roof well maintained. When it comes to including your home in your estate plan, you have a variety of different planning vehicles to choose from, but for a variety of different reasons, putting your home in a trust is often the smartest choice.

Although you should consult with us your Personal Family Lawyer® to identify the best estate planning strategies for your particular circumstances, in this two-part series we’ll discuss how trusts work (both revocable and irrevocable), and then outline the most common advantages of using a trust to pass your home to your loved ones compared to other planning strategies.

In simplest terms, a trust is an agreement between the “Grantor” (the person who puts assets into the trust) and the “Trustee” (the person who agrees to hold those assets) to hold title to assets for the benefit of the “Beneficiary.” Now, when the trust is a Revocable Living Trust, this agreement is typically made between YOU as the Grantor, and YOU as the Trustee, for the benefit of YOU as the beneficiary.

Why would you want to make an agreement with yourself, to hold title to assets for yourself, for the benefit of yourself? Well, it’s because by doing so you remove those assets from the jurisdiction of the court in the event you become incapacitated or when you die, and instead, you give the power to transfer those assets to your successor Trustee to handle without government or court intervention and keep it all totally private. This saves your family significant time, money, and headache.

While there are numerous different types of trusts available, when it comes to passing your home to your heirs, the two most commonly used trusts are a revocable living trust and an irrevocable trust.

When using a revocable living trust, or living trust, you are free to change the trust’s terms or even terminate the trust completely at any point while you are living, thus the term “living” trust. You typically act as your own trustee during your lifetime, and then you name someone (and ideally more than one someone in succession) as a successor trustee to take over management of the trust when you die or in the event of your incapacity.

At that point, your successor trustee will be responsible for managing the assets, and eventually distributing the trust assets to your chosen beneficiaries according to the instructions contained within the trust’s terms. Because you remain in control of the assets held by a living trust, the assets are still considered part of your estate for estate tax purposes, and assets held in a living trust are not protected from your creditors or lawsuits during your lifetime. This is a very important and often misunderstood point.

A revocable living trust does not protect your assets from creditors or lawsuits, and it has no impact on your income taxes. That said, as long as the assets are held by a living trust, they can be protected from your beneficiaries’ creditors, lawsuits, and even a divorce settlement. More on this below.

The key benefit of a living trust is to pass your assets (including, and especially your home) without any need for court or government intervention, and to ensure your home (and other assets) pass in the way you want, to the people you want.

Unlike a revocable living trust, an irrevocable trust is (as the name implies), irrevocable. This means that the terms of the trust cannot be changed, and the trust cannot be terminated once it’s been executed. When you transfer assets into an irrevocable trust, you relinquish all ownership of the assets, and the trustee you have named takes total control of the assets transferred into the name of the trust. Because you no longer own the assets held by the trust, those assets are no longer considered part of your estate, and they typically won’t be subject to estate taxes upon your death, and they eventually will not be vulnerable to creditors or lawsuits, as long as the trust is properly constructed.

Although avoiding estate taxes and gaining protection from creditors and lawsuits may sound like a huge benefit, irrevocable trusts come with some serious restrictions and can be quite complex to set up. Because you no longer own the assets held in an irrevocable trust and generally cannot change the trust terms or terminate the trust once it’s been executed, putting your home in this type of trust should only be done with very clear and specific legal guidance by a lawyer who specializes in asset protection.

In light of these factors, if you are looking to set up an irrevocable trust in order to qualify for Medicaid, lower your estate tax liability, or for some other reason, meet with us to discuss your options.

For a trust to function properly, it’s not enough to simply list the assets you want the trust to cover. When you create your trust, you must also transfer the legal title of your home and any other assets you want held by the trust from your name into the name of the trust. Retitling assets in this manner is known as “funding” your trust.

Funding your trust properly is extremely important because if an asset, such as your home, hasn’t been properly funded to the trust, the trust won’t work, and your family will have to go to court in order to take over ownership of the property. Given this, it’s critical to work with us, your Personal Family Lawyer® to ensure your trust works as intended.

While many lawyers will create a trust for you, few will ensure your assets are properly funded. As your Personal Family Lawyer®, we will not only make sure your home and other assets are properly titled when you initially create your trust, we will also ensure that any new assets you acquire over the course of your life are inventoried and properly funded to your trust. This will keep your assets from being lost, as well as prevent your family from being inadvertently forced into court because your plan was never fully completed.

Next week, in part two, we’ll continue with our discussion of the benefits of putting your family home in a trust.

Proper estate planning can keep your family out of conflict, out of court, and out of the public eye. If you’re ready to create a comprehensive estate plan, contact us to schedule your Family Wealth Planning Session. Even if you already have a plan in place, we will review it and help you bring it up to date to avoid heartache for your family. Schedule online today.

By finding an experienced attorney, you can take advantage of the different estate planning for seniors tools. That said, estate planning really should be considered as soon as you acquire your first asset, have a child, or step into adulthood in any truly meaningful way. And yet many of us put it off for far too long, leaving ourselves and our families at risk of getting stuck in the court system in the event of an unexpected accident, illness, or injury.

Once you (or your parents) reach senior status, you can no longer pretend that estate planning is something you can put off. The effects of aging become impossible to ignore, and the fact that you’re not going to live forever moves to the front of your mind.

While planning for your incapacity and death can be scary, it’s even more frightening to think of the potential tragedies that can arise if you and your family don’t have the right planning in place. More and more, the media is highlighting the reality that without proper planning, the elderly can lose everything, even if they have family looking after them.

At the senior stage of life, effective estate planning is urgent, both for you and the people you love. And if you aren’t a senior yet yourself but have senior parents, get your own planning handled, and then use that as a model to get your parents’ planning taken care of.

Here are a few of the most common errors seniors make when it comes to estate planning and how to fix them:

Fortunately, all of the above areas can be effectively managed using a trust. However, some people are reluctant to use trusts because they’re unfamiliar with them and have been told a will is all they need.

What’s more, because until fairly recently trusts were primarily used by the ultra-wealthy, many believe they’re an extravagance they don’t need and can’t afford. But the truth is, people of all income levels and asset values can afford and benefit from trusts, which provide numerous protections unavailable through wills.

If you’re relying solely on a will for estate planning, you’re missing out on many valuable safeguards for your assets, while also guaranteeing your family will have to got to court when you die.

If you aren’t sure what you need, begin by contacting us for a Family Wealth Planning Session. Your Family Wealth Planning Session is custom-designed to your assets, your family, your wishes, and to educate you on the best way to reach your objectives for the people you love.

1. That your loved one’s (or whoever you would want to have your currency) know about it; and
2. That they know how to access it and cash it in or hold onto it.

If you are holding your currency in an exchange, such as coinbase, with 2-factor authentication, it could be very difficult for your loved one’s to access your currency. We are in process of setting up a digital account administration system for our clients and you can look forward to that in the coming months. Having that in place would allow the executor of your estate to handle all digital accounts, not just crypto accounts.

Until then, best practice is to transfer your cryptocurrency into a “paper wallet”, which is kind of ironic given that it’s a digital currency. And it basically involves storing codes offline that allow you to access your currency. Here’s the thing, if you lose those codes, or your loved ones can’t find them, it’s the same as all of your currency being gone.

You can read more about the different storage options for cryptocurrency here.

Bottom line: if you have cryptocurrency and you want your loved ones to have it after you are gone, you should probably call us so we can make sure it’s not lost upon your incapacity or death.

As a new technology, cryptocurrency can be a bit confusing, and not many lawyers are even thinking about this issue yet. But we are, so give us a call and let’s have a Family Wealth Planning Session during which we can help you to  protect and preserve what matters most. Before the session, we’ll send you a Family Wealth Inventory and Assessment to complete that will get you thinking about what you own, what’s most important to you, and what you can do to ensure your family is taken care of. Schedule online.

Yours, mine and ours… in today’s modern family, it’s oh so common. The blended family is the product of 2nd (or more) marriages, in which one or more of the parties comes with children from a prior marriage. And then, they may even go on to have children together. So, how can legal planning help build a strong blended family?

If you have or are part of a blended family, it’s important to understand how estate planning could be exactly what you need to keep your family out of conflict and in love, both during life, in the event of incapacity, and when one or more of the senior generation (read: parents) dies.

Let’s begin with an understanding of where potential conflicts could arise when you have a blended family.

If you have children from a prior marriage, and you become incapacitated or die, leaving everything to your new spouse or partner, there is almost certain to be some conflict (whether spoken or not) between your children and new spouse.

Your children may feel unloved, forgotten or resentful.

You may think that this can be avoided by leaving everything to your new spouse or partner, and then on his or her death, to your children. But this too could set up a scenario where your children feel the need to monitor your spouse/partner’s use of your assets, during his or her life. And that may not be what you want.

Conversely, you may have a partner or spouse that you have not planned for, who you would want to inherit some or all of your assets. But, as things stand right now, your entire estate may go to your children from a prior marriage. This could create a reality where your current partner even gets kicked out of the house you share, if something happens to you before your plan is updated.

You can avoid all of this (and even use the estate planning process to build stronger bonds) by having clear planning in place that has been discussed with your children and your new spouse or partner. We facilitate this as part of the planning process for all blended families.