QUESTION
can i create another living trust not having to cancel the old one?
Asked on Nov 30th, 2014 on Trusts and Estates - California
More details to this question:
I need to make changes to my current revocable living trust that I made in 1996. Many things have changed in my life. My old trust lawyer who created the trust for me has now been retired and moved away. He has transferred my trust to another one of his colleagues. The new trust lawyer would charge me $900 to make changes. I just remembered that I had made a public television donation and received a Suze Orman package to make my own living trust. I would like to make my own living trust using her computer program. That way if I ever want to make anymore changes to my trust I would not have to pay for the legal fee. Is it possible to do so? What do I need to do in order to make sure that I void/cancel the trust properly? Do I need to void the previous trust first, then creat a new one after? What do I need to do?
1 ANSWER
Taxation Attorney serving Santa Monica, CA
at
Lyster, Inc.
Update Your Profile
A revocable trust may be revoked, certainly. If you have transferred property into that trust, then you'll need to transfer it back to yourself and then into the new trust. That is very important. A far easier approach would be to "restate" the old trust. You would then keep the old trust name and date of original execution, but the entire document will have changed.
I have no experience with the Suze Orman "do it yourself" trust package. Perhaps it's just me as a laweyr speaking, but I haven't been impressed with the "canned" trust documents I've seen. If a new client comes to me with one of those packaged documents I will always restate the entire document. I've also seen a number of issues arise following the death of the settlor of one of those trusts. The $900 fee quote sounds quite reasonable to me (depending upon the expertise of the lawyer giving you that quote).
A trust ceases to exist when all of its property has been transferred. The trust "lacks corpus." Be certain that if you do make your own new trust that you re-do your "pour over will" too. (If you don't, and you die with assets held outside of your trust, that old trust may just spring back to life with new corpus provided under the terms of the old will.)
Answered on Dec 01st, 2014 at 12:30 PM