Video Summary
Do you understand your trust? I would suggest that probably you understood your trust whenever you signed it, but if you’re quizzed about your trust three or four weeks or certainly a year later, you probably don’t understand it because it’s about 16 pages or longer, and that’s a lot of stuff in it that the lawyer knows about, but you don’t necessarily understand, other than what you remember about the trust, and so I would suggest that you probably don’t understand your trust, but I do suggest that you maybe read it, review it and maybe contact a lawyer to have him review it with you to make sure that it accomplishes everything you would like to have done, particularly as far as whenever you pass away that it goes to who you want it to go to in the manner you want it to go to, and if you have a spouse involved, that the spouse either has flexibility as far as changing the trust after your death or, if you don’t want them to have any flexibility, many times trusts, as well as wills, but particularly with trusts, if they’ve been drafted for eight or ten years and they haven’t been revised, there’s provisions on how they set up an irrevocable trust at your death for tax purposes, and that has some real problems whenever you have an irrevocable trust, particularly for a spouse, which was not giving the spouse any flexibility.
Also, there’s a lot of confusion as to the ability to amend trusts, change joint trusts after one of the joint settlers or grantors of a joint trust passes away. So I urge you to dust off your trust document, look it over, and if you’d like, give me a call and we can sit down and go through your trust. And first I’ll ask you what you’re trying to accomplish; and, two, then we’ll review it to see if it does what you want it to do, and we’ll point out any irregularities or problems with it as far as what it accomplishes.
So if you’d like for me to review your trust, give me a call at 727-847-2288. Thank you.