The Benefits of Preparing a Trust
News & Blog
Jun 13, 2016
Preparing a trust is a crucial part of your estate plan, especially when you want to leave your money and assets to your loved ones. Trusts ensure that your assets and money, managed by a trustee, are set aside and made available to your beneficiaries when the time is needed. However, preparing trusts can often be a complex, time consuming, and costly process. But why go to all of this trouble if you don’t set up your trust properly?
When trusts are prepared properly, the process remains smooth and simple and there are many benefits and objectives of planning and preparing a trust, here are a few of them.
- Avoiding taxes:One common tax-saving trust is an irrevocable life insurance trust. After you pass away, the proceeds from your life insurance policy are added back into your estate, often turning an estate that isn’t subject to federal estate taxes, into an estate that needs to write a substantial check to the IRS. However, life insurance trust shelters life insurance death benefit proceeds from estate taxes. After setting up the trust, you still have life insurance, and your beneficiaries still receive the proceeds from your policy, without the hassle of estate taxes.
- Avoiding probate: By keeping certain property out of your probate estate, you may be able to avoid many of the hassles, costs, and lack of privacy concerns related to probate.
- Protecting your estate: One of the primary uses of a trust is to protect your property even after it becomes someone else’s estate. Trusts allow you to plan and manage the money that your beneficiary receives as you see fit. You can choose to give your beneficiary small amounts of the sum each year for some duration, and then a final lump sum at a certain age. Or you can add conditions to how the money in the trust is dispersed. This allows you to make a plan that you see is most suitable to protect your assets.
- Providing funds for educational purposes: Trusts can make money available to your children, grandchildren, other relatives, or even nonrelatives for educational purposes, such as college tuition and living expenses. You can set up and fund trusts that parcel out money for educational purposes with a no-school, no-money restriction.
- Benefiting charities and institutions: You can help out charities by setting up some type of charitable trust that may, for example, annually give money to the charity while you’re still alive, give a larger amount upon your death, and then continue to make regular payments out of the remainder. You can even set up a charitable trust to make regular payments to the charity for some amount of time.
Disclaimer: This article is intended to provide a general summary of laws in the State of California and should not be construed as a legal opinion nor a complete legal analysis of the subject matter. Noelle Minto is an attorney at NM Law, APC in Tustin, California, a law firm specializing in Trusts & Estates and Business Transactions.
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I was referred to NM Law after dealing with a myriad of problems in settling a complicated Trust in Riverside County. At the initial meeting, Noelle Minto and Samantha Smith listened to the mess I was in and answered the questions I had. They provided me with information regarding my duties as a Trustee, made me aware of important dates that were upcoming, important dates already missed, and devised a plan to settle the Trust while protecting me, personally. When I left the first meeting, I felt that I was in good hands.John Schroeder was brought on to work on my case with Samantha and they updated/collaborated with Noelle. Noelle, Samantha and John are all patient, direct and very personable. Their knowledge and professionalism are exceptional. NM Law was successful in achieving a Settlement Agreement under difficult circumstances amongst people with little trust in one another. Thankfully we did not have to bear the cost of going to trial, however, I have complete confidence that NM Law would have prevailed if we had.I highly recommend NM Law. I look forward to working with them again, but this time to plan my estate.
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Ms. Minto,I want to thank you and your staff for the courtesy extended to us during our family's pending emergency deadline.Mr. O'Grady spoke to my brother and gave us his best recommendation regarding my father's estate.It is really hard to speak, and even harder to "plan" generational wealth with a parent in terms of assets, intentions, and mortality, but it is a necessary conversation to have, if only to lessen the unfairness of life that eventually catches up to all of us.Our family tried to bring justice to my father's death within this probate process and found no justice, this system must be changed, so that a fairness is inherit within this system and not just a scam—lots of hard lessons to be learned from a broken probate process.In either case, thank you again for giving our family the attention and direction we sought. The adage is true, not all lawyers are the same. Looking forward to working with your office in the near future, as we don't want to repeat this experience with our Mom.Gracias,Abraham
NM Law is an excellent law firm to work with! Noelle and her team are very thorough and knowledgeable. They explained the estate planning process to us and kept us informed every step of the way.We highly recommend NM Law for your estate planning needs.
I have worked with many attorneys, and there are very few that I would ever recommend. Noelle and her team have gone above and beyond to help all of our clients that we have referred to her. There is no one else that I would recommend for estate planning in the area.
I was first referred to Noelle Minto by my family law attorney Mike Monarch to provide oversight on my husband’s Trust conforming with our Post Marital Agreement. Her outstanding legal insights helped me to feel secure that both documents were in alignment. These interactions caused me to hire Noelle Minto to create a restatement of my own trust (1999) to be more relevant and reflect my current financial portfolio. Her professional guidance was outstanding. Noelle was always available, friendly, insightful, and mindful of my needs. I would even say highly intuitive. She certainly expanded my knowledge of wealth distribution. I also valued the Law firm’s entire team. Edward was delightful to work with as well. I highly recommend Noelle Minto and her knowledgeable legal team for their exceptional legal services on Family and individual Trusts. I will be making referrals to my friends in the future.
Noelle and Samantha and their team are amazing. They are extremely knowledgeable and professional (they are the best). They have and continue to support me and my family while dealing with my parents Will and Trust. Samantha is very patience with all my questions.I highly recommend NM Law.
My wife and I went to Noelle to update our 36 year old family trust. Since our trust was so old she rewrote our trust and wills in their entirety. We have a large family with kids, daughters-in-laws, and 13 grandkids. So it was a complex task. She spent plenty of time with us making sure every detail was exactly the way we wanted, and had some good ideas that we liked. And her assistant, Tatiana, was very helpful. Noelle did an excellent job and we are very pleased and confident that we now have everything in proper order.
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