Why Should Your Family Have a Living Trust?
Among the many benefits, you will enjoy by having a Living Trust is greater asset protection. When you create a Trust, you create a valuable tool for preventing creditors from attaching your assets. If you are ever forced to hire a Utah bankruptcy attorney, you may find all of your assets protected if your trust has owned them for ten years.
What is the Purpose of a Living Trust?
The purpose of creating a Living Trust is to avoid living probate, death probate, and reduce or even eliminate federal estate taxes. It’s not a vehicle for reducing income taxes. Most Living Trusts have the owners who created it serve as the Trustee. For income tax purposes, if you’re the trustee of your Living Trust, you will file your income tax returns exactly as you filed them before the trust existed. There are no new returns to file and no new liabilities created. A Utah special needs trust provides additional safeguards for children with special needs.
What Value does a Living Trust Provide?
An extremely valuable reason for creating a Utah Living Trust is to provide your family and heirs with the answers they need. While no one likes to contemplate their own mortality, the Living Trust can help you preserve and increase your estate while you’re alive, and offers protection should you become mentally incapacitated. The Living Trust is the road map you provide for your family and directs the transition of control and ownership of property, the transfer of real property, and administration of your estate and wealth when you may be otherwise unable to make your own decisions.
What Can a Living Trust Own?
A Utah Living Trust can—and should—own everything you do. Specifically, your Living Trust should be the beneficiary of all life insurance policies, the listed owner of your bank accounts, the record owner of all real property, and the owner of your companies.
All real estate should be transferred into your Living Trust. Investors in the real property who own real property in many states without a Living Trust will be required to pass through death probate in every state where they owned property. When your real property is owned by your Living Trust, there is no probate anywhere.
Contact a Utah Living Trust Lawyer
At Pearson Butler, our Utah living trust lawyer team can help you set up a Utah living trust to provide the advantages discussed above. Call a Utah Estate Planning Lawyer at (800) 265-2314.
