A will is effective in making sure that your assets go to the people you want to have them. But a will by itself cannot avoid the time and expense of probate.

A trust, on the other hand, eliminates the 12 – 18 months of waiting and $29,000 in attorney fees and other costs required for the average estate,
according to a recent survey by the ABA. In addition, trusts are extremely flexible and can be designed to deal with very specific and unique planning
situations.

You can create a trust during your lifetime and fund it with most or all of your assets. Once in the trust, your money and property are under the control of the trustee — but don’t let that worry you. You can be the trustee of your own trust, which means you remain in control.

If you are married or in another committed relationship, you and your spouse or partner can be the co-trustees. At any time you may take money or property out of the trust, put more into it, change it, or completely revoke it.

You remain in total control as long as you wish — or until your death. Then the person you’ve named as successor trustee takes over. Before we get into the specifics of how a trust can help you, you might like to know a little bit about the structure of a trust and how if works.

Most people, including many lawyers, think of a trust as a thing or an entity. While that conception is accurate in a specific tax setting, i.e., when the trust itself is subject to taxation, it is not accurate in general. And in some situations, such as using trusts in conjunction with retirement plans, life insurance, or with business entities such as LLCs, it can be very confusing.

Question: If a trust is not a thing, what is it?

Answer: It’s a relationship. More specifically it’s a relationship between a person (a trustor or settlor) who transfers property to another person (the
trustee or legal owner) for the benefit of a beneficiary (the beneficial owner). In essence, it’s a way for an individual to split up individual ownership of
an asset into three different kinds of ownership. But why, you might ask, would anyone want to do this?

The original reason was to devise a way for large landowners in medieval England to get around the strict laws of primogeniture, which prohibited all
land transfers at death, except to the oldest son. Although we use trusts in different ways now (since the laws of primogeniture are no longer in effect), the
structure of the trusts has remained the same for well over 700 years.