How to Fund Your Trust

Counsel from a Proven Rancho Cucamonga Estate Planning Lawyer

You’ve gone through the process of creating an estate plan for yourself and your family. This is a tremendously important step in ensuring that your loved ones and assets are taken care of should something happen to you. Your estate plan consists of a trust and will, and other documents such as a power of attorney for finances and an advance health care directive. However, there’s one more extremely important step in making sure your estate plan is in place—you need to properly fund your trust.

Funding your trust, either a revocable living trust or irrevocable trust, is the actual process of transferring assets from your name personally into your trust. This step must be done to ensure that your wishes are properly carried out and that your estate does not go through probate. This step typically entails changing the title to your assets from your individual name (or joint names, if a married couple) to the name of your trust and also changing beneficiary designations to your trust (if appropriate).

Some of your assets may have title documents, showing who is the legal owner of that particular asset. Examples of these assets include real estate, bank accounts, and investment accounts. To fund your trust with these assets, you must ensure that the legal title is changed over to your trust. For real property, such as your home, a new grant deed would need to be prepared and recorded with the county recorder.

Other assets may not have title documents, such as personal property—jewelry, clothing, valuables, family heirlooms, etc. These assets can be transferred into your trust by drafting a separate document called an Assignment of Personal Property.

At Nguyen Law Group, we work with you every step of the way to ensure that your trust is always funded properly. You don’t want to go through the whole process of creating an estate plan just to have it all be for naught if you forget to fund your trust. The knowledgeable Rancho Cucamonga estate planning attorneys at Nguyen Law Group will work side by side with you to make sure your trust assets are in order. We prepare and file all real property deeds, even for out of state properties.

Contact us today to schedule your free consultation about how to create your estate plan.