Living Trust: Pros and Cons

Estate planning offers a wide array of options for planning purposes. For instance, a traditional will provides an accounting of your wishes after you’ve passed away and gives a guideline for how you want your assets to be re-distributed to love ones. A living will provides this same type of information on a medical level, giving your family and friends a clear idea of what your wishes are medically-speaking should you become incapacitated and unable to make decisions on your own. A living trust Phoenix offers you the option to re-title your property and manage it through the trust, so that the property won’t go through probate upon your passing. This can save your loved ones significantly in terms of time and money. However, like any other component of estate planning, there are pros and cons to having a living trust Phoenix.

For most, the major pro is the fact that the property can be re-titled into the trust, allowing you – or a designation of your choice – to act as trustee of the property. There is also a beneficiary named in the event that you can no longer administer the trust. The purpose of this is to not only avoid probate for the property upon your passing, but also to give you a tool with which to manage your property as long as you can, while having a back-up plan when you cannot any longer.

Moreover, avoiding probate is a huge pro for many people. Probate can eat into any left-over assets as part of an estate fairly quickly. Moreover, it can leave the property in limbo for an extensive period of time, which is problematic if heirs want to sell or utilize it, per your wishes detailed through the living trust Phoenix and/or the traditional will document.

However, despite the presence of such pros, there are some cons to the process as well. For instance, it is important to re-title the deed to your home – and any other documents you want to include in the living trust Phoenix. Not being diligent in doing this will result in the entire purpose of the trust being defeated and the property going through probate anyway. Also, in some instances, the process of probate isn’t as complicated as most people think. So taking this extra step to put together a living trust Phoenix might be unnecessary in some cases because the probate process is short enough that things can be resolved quickly, sometimes in a matter of a few weeks.

Another pro of a living trust is that it can be dissolved at any time. This means that if you find that it isn’t working for you as you thought or after putting together other elements of your estate plan, find that you don’t need it, you can simply re-title your deed back to what it was originally and take it out of the living trust Phoenix designation.

It should also be noted that if you have more than one property or property in more than one location, a living trust Phoenix might be a perfect option for you, since you don’t want the probate process to happen in several different places. Moreover, since you clearly can be on-site to manage multiple properties as you move into old age, it helps to designate another trustee for this purpose so that the property can be tended to in the event that something happens to you. And if your property is located in a state with complicated property laws, you would want for your property to avoid probate and a living trust Phoenix can help with this.

Finally, a living trust Phoenix allows you to keep the proceedings of your estate private. Anytime you have some element of your estate go through probate, this is a public process and anyone can access information about your estate throughout. A living trust Phoenix is private and ensures that your estate remains that way.

If you aren’t sure of whether or not a living trust is right for you, do your research and find out about all of the options available to you in your estate planning arsenal. Talk to loved ones and come to a consensus together to ensure that you’ve made the right decisions for your estate.

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If you are not sure as to what legal document you currently have contact one of our professionals to help you with your estate planning. They will make sure you have all of your grounds covered and have the right legal documents that best suite your wants and needs.