When it comes to planning out what will happen to your assets upon your passing, it may seem as though your options are endless and it can be hard to know which products are best for you. It may seem even more confusing when the options seem to overlap, as they do with a traditional will and a living trust. A living trust account stipulates what will happen to your major assets, such as real estate, upon your passing, while allowing you to administer them while you are still living. A traditional will gives you a place in which to account for your wishes relating to all things – from custody of living minor children to what you want to happen to your favorite jewelry and beyond. They are two different products and can be used separately or together to create a whole approach to estate planning.

A Phoenix living trust is often utilized for real estate purposes. It allows you to title your real estate assets into the trust, meaning you can administer it while you are still living and manage it just as you would have prior to re-titling it into the trust. However, once you pass, instead of your property going through the process of probate, the benefit of the trust is that it would then pass directly to the person in question named as the beneficiary in the living trust document.

By comparison, a traditional will simply allows you the option to dictate how you want your assets to be divided. However, the major assets of the estate, such as property, must go through a specific legal process before they can be administered to anyone stipulated in the will document. Probate is often costly to the estate and extremely time consuming, which means it could be some time before the asset in question can be accessed by whomever was named in the will for this purpose.

More often than not, these two products are used together to complement one another. The living trust can be utilized for property purposes, while the traditional will document can be used to stipulate some of the details about other elements of the estate. When it comes to planning for this purpose, you can never have too many tools through which to plan what will happen to all things under the umbrella of your estate. In fact, the more you plan, the easier you make it on your loved ones.

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