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Avoid Probate with a Living Trust.
The primary purpose of a Living Trust is to protect your assets after your death and ensure your heirs receive them without hassle, unnecessary delays, or financial loss. A trust does this by keeping your assets out of Probate Court. Rather than having a judge assign an attorney (who is paid out of your estate) to oversee the distribution of your assets, you assign this duty to someone you know and trust.
This is Jim Deloisio and I have been a practicing attorney in California since 1990. I currently oversee the legal department of Torchlight Tax, and have been working with its CEO Dave Horwedel since 2017. You may have heard horror stories about Probate. These are common. Sometimes Probate works OK. This is usually when no real estate or large assets are involved. If real estate, large assets, or operating companies are involved, I recommend a Living Trust be set up (along with other asset protection strategies that protect your assets throughout your lifetime). We would put your personal assets into your living trust. This protects these assets from having to go through Probate Court. This can easily be updated as you accumulate or dispose of assets. Probate takes your assets and gives it to the court system to distribute. It can cost a lot of money to your estate and thus your heirs. When your assets go to Probate Court, it becomes part of the public record. This has disadvantages. Maybe your son’s ex-wife sees it and her lawyer now wants more alimony. Maybe a relative was left out or got less than they felt they deserved and decides to sue. By going through Probate, you are setting your heirs up for lawsuits. Now, in a living trust, someone you trust is the Trustee when you pass. There is no public announcement, and the courts are not involved. If finding someone you can trust is a problem, and you are interested in a living trust, contact Torchlight Tax. A properly drafted trust agreement makes sure your instructions are adhered to. Also, the trust agreement is a PRIVATE DOCUMENT. You have given your instructions to the trustee, and he simply sits down and carries out your instructions. Not everybody gets to see it. It is not easy to file a lawsuit against a trust. First, the potential plaintiff may not know about it. Second, the plaintiff wannabee does not know what is in the trust and thus cannot easily hire an attorney on contingency. Third, by the time he is ready to sue, the assets of the trust may have been distributed and the trust may have even ceased to exist. A properly set-up trust has provisions in it to protect the interests of your chosen heirs. In Probate, an attorney is hired by the court and paid out of your estate. This can get expensive, especially if the will is contested. The longer Probate goes the more the attorney is paid. The idea of a living trust is to allow the trustee to handle your instructions with minimum fuss. Your estate is kept out of court, and there is no delay handling your assets. The trustee can pay the mortgage and utilities out of the bank account with no delay. He can handle any bills that need to be paid. If you have an active business, he can make sure the business is kept going and ensure that the successor is on the job and handling matters. If you have rental properties, he can make sure rents are collected and any needed repairs are done. You can put into the trust all Bank accounts, money market accounts, stocks, bonds, gold, cryptocurrency, et cetera. There are other advantages of Living Trusts as well. You make life a lot simpler for your heirs. You can also use them to reward what you consider good conduct. You do not have to leave $100,000 to a nineteen year old grandson who might blow it partying. You can have the funds available for college expenses which the trustee can pay while the grandson is going to college. Once again this is Attorney Jim Deloisio. There are a lot of nuances about trusts, taxes, and asset protection.
We at Torchlight Tax are glad to assist you on these. I am now turning this over to the CEO of Torchlight Tax, Dave Horwedel.
Hi. This is Dave Horwadell. We have a highly professional team here that handles all aspects of Taxes, Accounting, and Asset Protection, and sets up and uses entities such as LLCs, Trusts and Corporations to save tax dollars and protect your assets.
Would you like to maximize your tax savings? Would you like to minimize asset risk? Would you like to pro-actively do tax-savings and asset protection planning? Then contact us for a free consultation. Contact Torchlight Tax at 1-877-758-7797 or email us at info at TorchlightTax.com. Also, please like, subscribe and share this video, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can be notified when we release new videos. Thanks for watching.