Welcome back to this week’s blog. This week will be the third week of a short miniseries about estate planning mistakes people make which cost a lot of money and aggravation. We hope you enjoy this week’s article, which focuses on trust issues.
The trust is the single most effective estate planning tool available. There are many different types of trusts. Among the better known and more commonly used are revocable trusts, irrevocable trusts and testamentary trusts. In addition to protecting your privacy, a trust will help you leave what you want, to whom you want, in the way you want—at the lowest possible cost. A good estate planning attorney may seem expensive, until you consider that they charge only a fraction of what the IRS and state tax could take of your estate.
However, you will need to be careful of the attorney you hire. A trust can be thought of as a safe. It can do a great job of protecting your hard earned wealth, but if there’s nothing in the trust—i.e. nothing in the safe—what good does it do you? None whatsoever. Which begs another question, why would someone go to the trouble of creating a trust and then not fund it? The answer is quite often that the person in question simply never gets around to it. He or she procrastinates, resulting in an unfunded trust—which is worse than no trust at all.
We, at Secure Planning Strategies, are here to help our clients navigate around the pitfalls when it comes to estate trusts. If you don’t want to wait for the next week’s blog article and you really want to get started today, please give us a call at: (248) 827-2580 or e-mail us at: info@spsfinancial.com.
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