Estate Planning FAQs

If you want to know if you need a will or a trust, the answer is a solid “it depends,” and it depends on what you’d like to accomplish. Do you want to direct what happens to your estate after you pass? Then you most likely want a Trust. Do you have a modest net worth, possibly less than $75,000, including your home, savings, etc? Then a Will would potentially suit your needs.

Probate is a legal process that is often required to manage and allocate an estate after someone dies. It is an expensive and time-consuming process, and we want to help your heirs avoid it.

Actually, having a will has the opposite effect on probate. Dying with a Will in place (or without a Will in place [intestate]) often leads to Probate needing to be opened. A will is likely NOT going to help your family avoid probate.

No, once your trust is signed by you and witnessed and notarized it needs to be funded. Funding is where you transfer items you own that have a title (house, car, golf cart, business, bank account, etc.) into the name of the trust (Example: From Bill Johnson to The Johnson Family Trust).

No, we are estate planners. We partner with attorneys to get your trust written for you and we take care of the rest. We work with you on the front end to gather all the information and communicate your needs to the attorneys. The attorneys then contact you to make sure we have it outlined properly. Then, when the trust is ready, we pick it up and take it to your home or office or meet you at our office to deliver the trust to you.

That depends on you. We can expedite your trust and have it done in as few as 3-5 days, but our typical turn around time is 10-15 days.

We can update your trust as needed. If someone you included in your trust needs to be revised, we can typically change that for a nominal fee.

Not really. We have done trusts for people as young as 22 and as old as 94 and almost every age in between. A trust is a mechanism to pass on your “stuff” to whomever you designate while avoiding probate. People with minor children want to have a direct say in where their minor children go, business owners want their business to be able to continue on after they pass. There are a number of good reasons why you should set up a trust regardless of your age.

There are no hard and fast answers here. You should look at your trust every 3-5 years, though, to make sure that it is serving the purpose you want/need it to. Different life events such as a wedding, birth of a child/grandchild, or a death should prompt you to go over your trust again to make sure it’s all valid.