| >... experience EXECUTING a Living Trust ....
If you mean, settling the estate, NO. But I am aware of some issues
that might be of some help.
My experience as a co-trustee on one of these (ie, not my estate) is
this:
- attorney charged $500 to set it up. Document is about 15 pages long
double spaced on legal size paper (for whatever that's worth).
- the document need not list the assets in the trust. It can say, for
example, Inventory, $10.00. Then the owner can simple start moving
assets into the name of the trust; for example a bank account, a
brokerage account. The attorney doesn't have to update the initial
document and need not know of this. The idea is that the language of
the Trust makes clear how assets should be disposed of after the
"settlor" (essentially the person whose stuff the Trust is about).
[ Note: If any reader knows that an up-to-date inventory is important
I'd like to hear about it. I'm assuming it shouldn't matter as long
as it is crystal clear whether an asset is insided the trust or not]
- types of topics to cover:
.beneficiaries, including all cases of some predeceasing the settlor
.reference to how assets are divided (can point to the Will)
.how decisions are made if the settlor becomes impaired (physical,
mental) -- that is who is "in charge", 1, or more ...
.what changes in the event one or more of the "in-charge" cannot or
no longer want to take on that responsibility
. standard statements about how the residual estate (after the
principle dies) is administrated - for example:
that bond doesn't have to be posted
that monies can be used to pay immediate expenses or legal fees,
or whatever
basically, clauses that arrange so that the courts cannot impose
"overseers" who can charge the estate to do what the Trustees
already can do themselves
SUggestion: Try to spend some time thinking ahead about two issues
when planning what to include:
a. what might happen from your perspective as a presumed
Trustee
b. what the settlor may want to protect or "prepare" for
from her/his point of view.
These may not initially agree.
For examaple, if you are married and a child of the
settlor, and you were to predecease both the settlor
and your spouse, what would the settlor want to
happen to your share of the assets and how would the
settlor want them administrated, vs. how you might
want same. This kind of stuff comes up in the text
or (should be handled in it). (Succession trustee
clauses)
c. Don't try to be too specific on how things should be
done: as there could later be irrelevant situations
that commit or tie up assets in ways you might not
want.
I know some of these ideas are vague. I only have my own experience to
go on.
Finally, the document can be ammended.
Hope this is of some help.
re - at time of inheritance:
My guess about the attorney's role in "handling" the "estate" if the
settlor dies, is that you will need/want an attorney to do certain
legaleze, and you may want to address how he charges for such work
before selecting him to "write" the Trust in the first place. But I
don't think there needs to be any big fees to actually settle the
estate. I would hope that the size of the estate would be rather
irrelevant -- rather the complexity of what the trust says is the
issue. But I guess you would have to discuss this with the attorney
first. They may actually charge a % of the estate to "finish it up".
I don't have specific figures, but 1% looms up as something I've heard.
You may be able to find an attorney who will claim he has a flat fee
which would be less. e.g. 1% of 600,000 is 6,000. If the estate had
only some bank accounts to be divided between 2 children, without a
contest, that would be a lot of money to charge for
changing account names (plus whatever other fixed overheads).
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| All your legal fees on the living trust should be incurred when you set
it up with no additional fees later on. My husband and I just went
though this exercise since we updated our estate planning and went with
a revokable trust [we're too young now to do anything irrevokable to
avoid estate taxes, so we'll settle for avoiding some estate taxes and
probate at this point]. All our financial assets and real estate has
gone over to the trust, so if one of us dies, there are no legal steps
to take nor any fees to incur since the trust still exists, and there
are still trustees to handle the trust assets. There are no assets to
go through probate as they are already in the trust.
There are a lot of reasons to use the living trust including passing
assets down to your heirs, avoiding probate, providing for the
children, avoiding contesting of a will and all its legal fees, and
keeping your financial business private [the contents of a will are
public record, but not so with a trust]. And you can do all sorts of
things in a trust. We have a spendthrift provision so that if the
trustee thinks the kids, who are beneficiaries, will spend the money in
an inappropriate manner, they don't have to give it to them right then
and can wait literally years til they reach the age at which the trust
gets dissolved. And you get to pick those ages.
I liked the idea of the trust since it makes settling the estate a bit
easier, and we were able to provide for all sorts of situations like if
we die and my son grows up, gets married, has a child and gets hit by
a train. We provided for his widow and child to get his portion to live
a comfortable life instead of the money being locked up til the child
reached the age of maturity.
If you want, I can even recommend our attorney who I thought had a very
reasonable fee structure especially since I had talked to other
attorneys who were much higher. The catch is that he sets up the trust
paperwork and such, but it is up to me to actually transfer all the
assets into the trust. At this point, I've got about half of it done
and am waiting on 1 more document to get the other half done to
minimize trips to the bank for signature guarantees.
Regards,
Cathy
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| We chose to have ourselves as co-trustees, and for back-ups I have my
brother first and then his brother. But since we are co-trustees,
there would hopefully be one of us left should the other die, so the
back-ups wouldn't be needed til we were both deceased.
I did not want a professional trustee or bank since they don't know me
and don't know what I want. I have regular conversations with both
brothers and have a written document to fill in the spaces for other
instructions, so I'm very comfortable with the way things are set up.
And it avoids the guardian of the children having to document every
expense to get reimbursed [and it does happen like that -- I've got a
friend in such a situation with how her kids' social security payments
are spent] as well as allowing a lot more flexibility.
If you want a professional trustee, you could go that route, but in my
situation, that is the least desirable. But then, when we just had a
regular will with a trust set up for the children if they weren't
majority age, my brother was designated as trustee with no restrictions
so this is not a change for me. To do this, though, you have to trust
your back-up trustee implicitly. In our case, we do.
Cathy
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| Don't know if this deserves a new topic but I was wondering if anyone has
used one of those living trust software packages. I was thinking of buying
one, the only one I've seen on the Macintosh is Nolo's Living Trust.
There's also a WillMaker program that seems to be highly recommended. Any
info would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Albert
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