My wife and I live in Georgia, and have a family trust from California. In order to add our house to the trust in Georgia, can I sign an affidavit that's notarized and place it with the paper's of the trust.Will it be valid?
In order to transfer your house here to a trust, you (and your wife, if she also is listed on the current deed to the house) will both need to sign a deed transferring the house from yourselves to the Trustee of the Trust. The Trustee MUST be named (by actual legal name) in the deed, using this sort of designation: "XYZ, as Trustee or successor Trustee(s) of The Joe and Mary Doe Revocable Trust U/A dated 1/1/2014." A deed which simply names the trust itself as transferee is not valid under Georgia law. Ideally, if you have any title insurance on the house, you also should do either a Warranty Deed or a Limited Warranty Deed, and NOT a quit claim deed, to transfer the house to the Trustee. A quit claim deed can end up costing you the benefits of any title insurance you may have in place.
I urge you to consult an estate planning attorney and not simply try to prepare the deed yourself. If you've moved here from California, there are probably a lot of updates which should ideally be made to your existing estate planning documents to ensure that they will work as well as possible. Georgia and California are very different. Just for one example, you may not really even need to keep the trust, since Georgia probate is much less difficult and less expensive than California probate and, unless there are other concerns, you may be able to simplify things by eliminating the trust instead of transferring your home to it.
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