Hire An Estate Planning Attorney For Trust Creation

One of the key reasons to hire an estate planning attorney is to create a trust for your assets. A trust is a type of legal entity. It works the way you set it up to work, but it is able legally to possess the ownership of your assets. As a result, it can help individuals to avoid complications associated with probate court; the legal process estates pass through at the time of a person's death. Probate is expensive and can cost some individuals up to 50 percent of the value of the assets left behind. To reduce these taxes, individuals may wish to consider the use of a trust.

How Does a Trust Work?

The most common form of a trust is a simple trust. Your estate planning attorney can help you to set it up and manage it over its lifetime. It is ideal for large estates or those who have specific wishes for how their assets are to be protected after death. In short, the grantor and donors will contribute to the trust's assets throughout their lifetime. In addition, it allows individuals' estates to continue to fund the trust even after death. More so, it allows for the person setting it up to make decisions about how the funds within it are used. This allows the ability to circumvent the system and make decisions about how your property should be divided after your death.

A simple example of this is a traditional trust left behind for a child's education. For example, if a grandparent wishes to establish a fund that will pay for their grandchild's college expenses, he or she can do this. The funds do not pass to the parents but rather directly to the child when he or she reaches the required age. Furthermore, the funds are not necessarily unprotected. Depending on the stipulations put in place at the time of the establishment of it, the trust can require that the grandchild go to a specific school, study a specific subject, maintain specific grades, or take other actions in order to have access to the funds. There are some legal limitations in this process, though, which must be considered when setting it up.

Ultimately, it is up to the individual to make decisions about what will happen to his or her belongings and financial assets at the time of their death. With the help of an estate planning attorney, you can craft legal documents that allow you to minimize the amount of loss of your estate's value to taxes. You can also create scenarios in which your wishes are protected no matter what those wishes may be. If you want to learn about a trust's impact on your estate's value, talk to your lawyer about it.