A trust is an estate planning tool that lets you transfer property, minimize taxes, preserve assets for minors until they reach adulthood and benefit a charity. A trust is also a great way to protect and promote family values like education, home ownership, land conservation, community service and religious beliefs.

The Advantages of a Trust

A revocable trust is a type of trust that can be changed at any time, allowing you to adapt your estate plans when your circumstances change or new family members come into your life. For example, you may decide down the line that a particular charitable organization is a good fit for your trust or that you want to add a new grandchild as a beneficiary.

When you use a revocable trust, you can be sure that your wishes will be carried out when the time comes. You can also name a successor trustee that will take over the trust when you die or if you become disabled.

Trusts can be used to protect assets that you might not be able to care for yourself, such as retirement funds, IRAs, and other types of investment accounts. They can also help you manage the amount of income that you pay in withholding or estimated tax payments.

There are several advantages to using a trust, including its flexibility and ease of implementation. If you’re considering creating a trust, the first step is to talk with an attorney.

The second step is to decide what you’d like to put in the trust and who will be responsible for managing the trust. A trust can be for anything you own, including money, bank accounts, stocks, bonds, real estate, vehicles, jewelry, artwork and writings.

Once you’ve decided what you want to put in the trust, it’s important to move those assets into it so that they can be protected. This is done by re-titling the assets and filing the necessary paperwork.

You should speak with an attorney to ensure that your documents are drafted correctly and that the property you want to protect is appropriately titled. Any property that is not titled to your trust will have to go through probate, which can be time-consuming and costly.

Lastly, you should make sure that the person who will serve as trustee is competent to be the trustee and can comply with the terms of the trust. If you do not feel confident that the person you are naming as trustee will be able to fulfill their duties, you should consider changing your designated trustee.

Some philosophers suggest that trust and reliance on others can be betrayed or at least let down, while others claim that merely relying on others in ways that make it possible to betray them is not trust (Baier 1986). Whether or not this kind of “trust” is warranted, however, remains an open question.