Funding Your Trust & Why it’s Important

You’ve met with an experienced attorney and taken the next step in a successful estate plan by having your revocable trust drafted, finalized and signed. While you certainly deserve to take a sigh of relief, don’t stray too far from your preparedness mindset just yet. You may have sought after a trust specifically to avoid probate*. Did you know that if you do not fund your trust properly it is still susceptible to court involvement? Creating a trust is not enough.

So how do you fund your trust? “Funding your trust” simply means transferring your assets from you to your trust. This requires you to physically change the titles of your assets from your name (or names, in the case of married couples) to the name of your trust. As the original trustee, you remain in control of your assets and with a revocable trust you can continue to buy and sell assets or remove assets from your trust as necessary.

Assets used to fund your trust can include real property, bank/savings accounts, and some business interests.

While there are some funding transfers your attorney can handle, the responsibility will be left to you to ensure your trust is properly funded. Fortunately, because revocable trusts are quite common, many institutions are familiar with transferring assets into trust, making the process smooth and fairly simple.

Our firm believes that the trust funding process should not be a difficult one, but one that provides you with a sense of accomplishment and relief. We are here to make that possible. Schedule a free 30-minute consultation today and let us provide you with the tools you need to reach your estate planning goals.

(*) We are committed to tackling a variety of questions and topics relating to estate planning. If you are interested in learning more about informal probate, or keeping up-to-date on future content, sign-up to get monthly list of our recent blog posts.

This article is provided as a public service by the Law Offices of C. David Martinez, PLLC. While the information on this site is about legal issues, it is not legal advice or legal representation. Because of the rapidly changing nature of the law and our reliance upon outside sources, we make no warranty or guarantee of the accuracy or reliability of information contained herein.