How to Avoid Probate in Mesa

Avoiding probate sounds difficult to some, but there are some simple ways to ensure that some, if not all of your property goes to your beneficiary or beneficiaries, without going through probate in Mesa.

When you create a trust, you are creating a way around probate. That is after your death, your estate is only counted for federal estate tax purposes and not probate. This is due to the fact that, you as the trustee own the property and have named a person to which the property will be transferred to after your death, thus avoiding probate in Mesa. The same goes for your bank and retirement accounts, which you can have made into payable-on-death accounts. You simply fill out a form that allows you to list a beneficiary or beneficiaries to whom you want the money to go directly instead of it going through probate in Mesa.

Another way to avoid probate is through joint ownership of property. For this, you simply fill out a form and show your joint ownership of the property, you then state that you would like the property to go to the other joint owner. You can avoid probate in Mesa by not only having a joint owned property, but by having community property with right of survivorship. This simply means that when one spouse dies the property automatically goes to the other spouse.

If you happen to give your property away to someone else while you are living, then when you die that property will not go through probate. This is due to the fact that when you were living you gave your property to some one, which is considered a gift and gifts are not subject to a federal gift tax.

Some reasons why you should try and avoid probate are because it can be time consuming, costly, and the information becomes public. The probate process is very time consuming because it is controlled by the courts and usually not expected to be solved within less than six months. Probate can be very costly due to the fact that the court will take a portion of the estate and use that money to pay probate fees and to hire attorneys and lawyers to protect minor beneficiaries. Once the probate process is started not only is the information about your estate made public, but the disbursement of the estate is made public as well.

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