A trust is an arrangement under which one person, called a trustee, holds legal title to property for another person, called a beneficiary. You can be the trustee of your own living trust, keeping full control over all property held in trust.
A "living trust" (also called an "inter vivos" trust) is simply a trust you create while you're alive, rather than one that is created at your death.
Different kinds of living trusts can help you avoid probate, reduce estate taxes, or set up long-term property management.
The big advantage to making a living trust is that property left through the trust doesn't have to go through probate court. In a nutshell, probate is the court-supervised process of paying your debts and distributing your property to the people who inherit it.
The average probate drags on for months before the inheritors get anything. And by that time, there's less for them to get: In many cases, about 5-10% of the property has been eaten up by lawyer and court fees.
Simply put, in most cases yes. Court challenges to living trusts, like challenges to wills, are rare. But if there is a lawsuit, it's generally considered more difficult to successfully attack a living trust than a will. That's because your continuing involvement with a living trust after its creation (transferring property in and out of the trust, or making amendments) is evidence that you were competent to manage your affairs.
Someone who wanted to challenge the validity of your living trust would have to bring a lawsuit and prove that: when you made the trust, you were mentally incompetent or unduly influenced by someone, or the trust document itself is flawed—for example, because the signature was forged.
While estate planning documents can be found online, in books, and generated by estate planning software, the majority of these are designed to cover the most basic of estate planning needs; in other words, not a one-size-fits-all solution. You want to ensure that you are creating a legally enforceable document free of mistakes that pertains to your individual situation.
Working with a Legal Document Assistant that has experience in creating Living Trust is an affordable alternative to what many Attorneys charge.
Property you transfer into a living trust before your death doesn't go through probate. The successor trustee—the person you appoint to handle the trust after your death—simply transfers ownership to the beneficiaries you named in the trust. In many cases, the whole process takes only a few weeks, and there are no lawyer or court fees to pay. When all of the property has been transferred to the beneficiaries, the living trust ceases to exist.
Is a living trust document ever made public, like a will? No. A will becomes a matter of public record when it is submitted to a probate court, as do all the other documents associated with probate—inventories of the deceased person's assets and debts, for example. The terms of a living trust, however, need not be made public.