Do you Need a Trust?

What is a trust and do you need one? Hi, I’m Troy Sharpe, CEO of Oak Harvest Financial Group, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ Professional (CFP®), host of The Retirement Income Show, and author of the upcoming book, Core4.

Before we get started, I want you to comment down below if you think only wealthy people need trusts. There are several different types of trusts, literally probably hundreds of different types of trusts. The two main things we should understand initially is trusts are either revocable or irrevocable. If they are a revocable trust, that means you have access to the money during your life and you do not have any creditor protection any asset protection.

A trust, in its most basic form, essentially is a– I don’t want to call it a glorified will, but when you place your assets inside there, essentially when you pass away, it bypasses probate, it bypasses the court process, and you’ll name beneficiaries and your assets will be distributed to your beneficiaries.

That is the main purpose of a revocable trust, one of the main purposes. An irrevocable trust is held outside of your estate. This just simply means when you put assets there, it’s irrevocable, it’s an irrevocable gift to that trust and you no longer have access to it. We’ll get into irrevocable trusts in a different video.

For the purpose of this video, I want to talk about the revocable trust because this is one that you could probably benefit from or maybe benefit from. No, not all wealthy people or only wealthy people need trusts. Think about your house. If you own your home, if you have a revocable living trust and you titled your home in that trust’s name, when you pass away, your property will bypass probate, bypass the courts, which could take 3 weeks, 6 weeks, 12 weeks, 6 months, depending on how complicated and involved the estate is and which state you live in, and your property will go directly to your kids or grandkids.

They will be able to sell it and use the money for that property for whatever they need at that time in their lives. A revocable living trust, essentially, you can put assets inside of it, your house, you title it in the name of the trust, your car, any assets that you have, and it will bypass probate and go directly to your beneficiaries, which can help avoid time, costs, and delay when you pass away. Just like any legal document, to create a trust, you want to go visit an attorney.

Typically, you want to see an estate attorney if you’re talking about retirement planning, but generally speaking, most attorneys can create a trust for you. Once again, hundreds of different types of trusts, we don’t have time to cover them all in this video, but one of the main ones that you could possibly benefit from is the revocable living trust.

This tool is simply used to retitle your home, your car, your personal property in the name of the trust and that will bypass probate, bypass the court process, and go directly to whomever you’ve named a beneficiary upon your demise. This will save your family members time, money, effort, headaches, frustration, and taking that estate planning step could be a possible solution to help improve the lives of your beneficiaries as part of a total retirement plan.

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