Many individuals set up a revocable living trust to provide for their loved ones after they’re gone. While many people assume that they have to have a tremendous amount of wealth to set up one of these, they don’t. You can take some of your most valuable assets and place them in the trust. You can also set aside small amounts of cash or your stock dividends into this estate planning tool. These are just some of the many ways to fund your living trust.
One of the reasons that so many individuals place their assets in a living trust is to make it easier for their loved ones to have their assets transferred to them after they’ve passed away. By placing them into a trust, it allows many valuable assets such as a home, investment portfolio, bank accounts and insurance policies to be seamlessly transferred over to their loved ones as they’d planned.
If you own certain items that you don’t have a title or deed to in the trust, then you can have an estate planning attorney here in Bridgewater help you draft an assignment that allows you to legally place them in there. Often, individuals will have personal property such as sports equipment, jewelry, artwork, books, cameras and clothing placed in the trust instead of including them in a will. This ensures that creditors can’t lay claim to them.
Some assets that you may want to use to fund your trust in addition to the aforementioned include any business interests such as intellectual property rights, any notes payable (money that someone else owes you) and any foreign or oil and gas assets. You may want to steer clear of placing any tax-deferred retirement plans or certain stock options in your trust though.
There are pros and cons to placing certain assets into your trust. An attorney here in Bridgewater can let you know about the different types of trusts that exist in New Jersey and what the benefits of placing your property into one may be.