Are living trusts hard to set up?
A trust is more work to create than a will because to make it work you have to actually transfer assets to the trust. This can be tedious and time-consuming. It may mean changing titles on real estate, for example. And when you deal with trust assets, you have to act as trustee, signing checks and other transactions in your capacity as trustee. A notorious problem lawyers see time and again is that people fail to transfer assets to the trust when it is created or forget to transfer assets acquired after the trust has been set up. If assets aren’t in the trust when you die, it’s basically useless. Lifetime disability planning suffers and the assets left out have to go through probate, defeating one reason you may want the trust in the first place (and underscoring why you need a pour-over will).
