How a Cincinnati Trusts Lawyer Helps You Make Sure Your Trust is Funded
By Barry Zimmer on August 9th, 2016 in Wills & Trusts
If you are creating a trust, a Cincinnati trusts lawyer can assist you with all of the legal requirements to ensure that your trust provides the protection that you expect. One of the most important steps in the process of creating a trust is to fund the trust. Your attorney will help you to decide what assets should be transferred to the trust and will assist you with the formal process of funding it.
Zimmer Law Firm has extensive experience with trust creation. Our legal team helps you with all the steps of using a trust to secure protection for your assets and heirs. This includes selecting the right type of trust, preparing your trust document, and funding your trust. Give us a call today to learn more about how we can help.
What Assets Should Go Into Your Trust?
There are different types of trusts, including living or revocable trusts and irrevocable trusts. There are also trusts for specialized purposes, including providing for someone who is disabled or making certain that a spendthrift heir cannot squander an inheritance quickly.
The types of assets which should be put into your trust are going to vary depending upon the type and the purpose of the trust. For example, if you are creating a trust to protect your assets from being counted as resources for purposes of qualifying for Medicaid coverage, you will need to include the assets in your trust which you wish to protect in case you must go into a nursing home. However, you must be aware that you will lose a substantial degree of control over the assets that you put into this type of trust.
If, on the other hand, you are creating a living trust as a part of your plan for incapacity, you should transfer assets to the trust which you want your backup trustee to begin managing if something happens to you. There are restrictions on the types of assets that can go into a living trust. For example, you typically cannot transfer qualified tax-advantaged retirement accounts like IRAs into a living trust, although you can make the trust the beneficiary on this type of account.
With the restrictions in place for funding trusts, you should talk with a Cincinnati trusts lawyer to help you decide what kinds of things should be transferred to the trust. In general, many people will transfer cash accounts; non-retirement investment accounts; non-qualified annuities; tangible personal property; ownership shares in a business; and potentially real estate.
How Can You Make Sure Your Trust is Funded?
Many people make mistakes when they create trusts. They will go through the process of creating the trust document, but do not actually take steps to formally fund the trust. In order to actually fund the trust and make sure the trust owns the assets that the trust was created to protect, you need to take some steps to change the legal ownership of the assets.
The process for doing this can vary depending upon the type of assets that you want to put into the trust. In some cases, you can prepare a short assignment, which is a simple document specifying that you want to transfer ownership of an asset to the trust.
In other situations, you must prepare more formal written documents that provide the exact wording to use on titles and beneficiary designations. For the transfer of real estate, a correction deed, warranty deed, grant deed, assignment, or quitclaim may need to be used to transfer of the ownership of the real property into the trust. The right tools will depend upon where the property is located.
Typically, those who create trusts will handle some part of the process of transferring assets themselves to fund the trust. However, attorneys can also provide invaluable assistance. A Cincinnati trusts lawyer can prepare assignment forms and letters to send to financial institutions. An attorney can also provide some specific details on the formal legal requirements that must be taken in order to transfer each type of asset into your trust.
Getting Help from a Cincinnati Trusts Lawyer
A Cincinnati trusts lawyer at Zimmer Law Firm can provide invaluable assistance with determining what assets should be held in your trust and in taking the necessary steps to make certain that those assets are formally transferred. To find out more about how we can help you, give us a call at 513.721.1513. You can also join us for a free seminar to learn more about trust creation in Ohio.