No. 83 of 106 Things We Do For Clients
Facilitate the transfer of investments from individual names to a trust, or from a trust or retirement plan to beneficiaries.
Surprisingly, the number-one reason that living trusts fail to avoid probate is because the assets were never transferred to the trust or were not transferred properly. We’ve seen this happen many times. Many people think their attorney will handle those details, and many attorneys rely on their clients to do the footwork. In other cases the paperwork done by the attorney is legally insufficient to transfer the property to the trust. The result is that a surprisingly high number of living trusts are never funded, causing unneeded additional expenses and occasionally an estate planning disaster.
