Hi all - we've recently been looking in to redoing our wills and went to a seminar about estate planning. I thought this might be of interest to some of you in regards to making sure your assets and business doesn't get hit too hard should you pass away.
At the seminar, they discussed the difference between probate and trust accounts. I must say I don't know why anyone would not have a trust, but there are instances where a trust would not work for you.
We found out that our kids would end up paying over $80,000 in probate costs and at least $40,000, if not more, in taxes in settling our estate if we both died. I was shocked. Had no idea about any of this.
We made an appointment with an estate planner after the seminar to see about setting up a trust. It would cost us about $3,000 to have him set one up. So then I was looking in to the trusts a bit more and was reading on nolo.com about trusts and saw that they said you really don't need an attorney to do the will or trust. You can do it yourself and it is completely legal and will hold up. The reason the trust is so expensive to set up, and the will so inexpensive, through an attorney, is that the attorney will recoup his costs when he does the probate on your estate. With the trust, there really isn't any other way he can recoup his costs, so he has to charge more for the trust work. Nolo.com recommends Quicken Willmaker Plus for putting together your will and trust, power of attorney etc. They offer it at the nolo.com site, but I found it through Costco on-line for $34.99 + shipping.
So far, with the Quicken software, I've set up a new will, a medical directive, a financial power of attorney, and a combined trust. It has been easy, and the greatest thing is that I have been able to fill out the forms, think about it overnight, come up with something I might have forgotten about, and go back in and make changes.
We'll be taking our forms in to be notarized this week, and then we start transferring all our assets in to our trust. This is where the trust part is so cool. The software even provides you with the certificates you will need to provide to your bank, DMV etc to transfer titles to the trust account.
Everything we own, either with a title or something like our businesses, we put in the trust name. Should we both die, the trust just flows to our kids without having to go through probate or taxes. From what I have found out talking to others, it is pretty seamless when you have a trust compared to going through probate.
Has anyone here set up a trust, and what do you think? Has anyone had a trust and dismantled it because it didn't work? Why didn't it work? Anyone know more about this process?
This is new territory for us, but our old wills (written in 1982) sent our kids to Canada to live with my brother and I don't think they would like that much right now, since they are 25 & 26 and have careers down here in the states:) It was time to update the wills, and it just morphed in to all this other stuff.
Cindy M |