Trusts are an integral part of our estate planning here at Casterline Law Offices. For an estate plan to work effectively, it needs to do more than simply distribute your assets after you’re gone. It needs to include appropriate asset protection, tax planning, and planning for long-term care or incapacitation.
As part of our work, we aim to be flexible; we tailor asset plans to your circumstances. We’ll take care to learn about your situation and draft an effective asset plan, perfect for you. For your estate plan, you should choose only a highly experience attorney, with great specialization in wealth preservation and estate planning.
To ensure that your estate plan enables you to manage your legal and financial affairs, we employ a variety of trusts as well as other legal tools. For instance, we use:
- Revocable Living Trusts
- Irrevocable Trusts
- Charitable Trusts
Revocable Living Trusts
A revocable trust is a trust that can be modified during your lifetime, enabling you to still use your assets. A living trust is a trust that is created during your lifetime and is not subject to probate. Revocable living trusts are a valuable legal tool in the creation of an estate plan.
One of the main advantages of a revocable living trust, as well as trusts in general, is that they are not subject to probate, meaning that you avoid the lengthy court proceedings involved with probate. Probate typically takes a long time, and any proceedings in a probate court are public, meaning that a trust offers far greater privacy.
Irrevocable Trusts
Irrevocable trusts are another useful legal tool used here at Casterline Law Offices to help provide expert estate planning. Irrevocable trusts are trusts that cannot be amended. This means that the trust cannot be changed once set up. There are legal systems in place to make amendments to irrevocable trusts in certain circumstances, such as if a beneficiary suffers with mental illness or substance addiction.
Charitable Trusts
Charitable trusts are used as part of an estate plan when you may wish to use your assets for charitable purposes. Charitable trusts can be used in a variety of ways. For instance, you may use your assets to create a charitable foundation and allow all or some of the interest that your wealth generates to go to the charity. You can also choose to have the assets signed over to the charity to be left in their control, or you may retain control of the trust, passing control over to a party of your choosing.