Your Most Trusted Document May Be Full of Holes…
Is your trust really what you think it is?
Odds are it isn’t.
Does it accomplish what you think it does?
Think again.
Ninety percent of the people we meet with don’t have a full understanding about how their trust works. Some clients come to us with trusts written so poorly or haphazardly that it would prohibit them sometime from accessing their own money in a timely fashion, yet alone at all.
Clients are also typically unaware of how their trusts function at specific, serious junctures throughout time, such as splitting of the trust and its assets upon death, creditor protection, divorces, etc. Furthermore, the implications that the trust has relating to insurance and retirement plans is especially complex. One of the most unfortunate things we see as financial advisors is a couple or individual who thinks that they have a foolproof document.
Regardless of the size of the document, or who constructed it, we find that after we sit down and review the trust with them step by step, there is usually always something included in that document that the owner does not wish to have included, and there is certainly a reason why this occurs.
Most documents we see are created with a very cookie-cutter software program that doesn’t allow for the flexibility of creating key administrative forms that you’ll need in the future. We’ll give you one guess as to why many law firms don’t include them!
It’s this type of awareness and education that we hope to instill in those who attend Trusts & Beyond. Just because your estate planning referral came from a trusted family friend or your document was created by a law firm that’s held in high regard—it doesn’t mean that the pieces of the puzzle are all included or that the trust can accomplish what you hope it will when the inevitable occurs.