Understanding the Drawbacks of Living Revocable Trusts
Hello, my name is attorney Jason Lile and I am the Oklahoma Will and Trust attorney for this part of northeastern Oklahoma. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about a topic that we’ve spoken about in previous videos about living revocable trusts. Again, it’s the instrument that I draw most frequently from my clients as a primary estate planning tool, but I’d also like to point out the drawbacks of it.
Although living revocable trusts are useful for a great many things, there are some things that they’re not good for, and I’ll tell you one of them. The living revocable trust typically makes you, the person who authorized and drew up the trust or had it drawn up, the trustee during your lifetime. That basically means that you have control over all of your things, they maintain your things, and you maintain control over them. In the event of your incapacity or death, then somebody else takes over for you.
The Problem with Living Revocable Trusts
The problem, or the biggest problem, with a living revocable trust is that there is a schedule on the back. The schedule on the back says these are the things in the trust. Oftentimes clients will not be thorough enough with that list, or as the trust ages, they will not keep up with the list, or they don’t have an attorney who’s knowledgeable enough to execute something called a pour-over will along with that list.
So then if your trust is activated by your incapacity or death, the successor trustee, the person who comes after you in control of your things, it’s not empowered to do things with property that wasn’t listed in the trust. Now that being said, I, for my clients, always recommend something called a pour-over will. We’ll talk about the difference between trusts and wills later, but a pour-over will is basically a document where if you’re forced to go into probate court, and obviously we draft trusts to try and keep people out of probate court, but if you’re sued into probate court by a creditor or a relative and they point out that the trust doesn’t have a thorough schedule in the back that says all the things in it, then the pour-over will literally say everything that I did not list on this trust schedule.
Contact a Living Trust Lawyer
If you want more information or need a Tulsa living trust attorney, contact me at oklahomawillandtrust.com.