Trusts Attorney in Hopkins, Minnesota

Advantages of a Trust vs Will

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Well, the way I kinda look at it is the difference between a trust and a will is it can either pay for it now or pay for it later. And what I mean by that is with a trust, I think that their popularity came on long before I was a lawyer. Before the probate code was rewritten, everybody was afraid of probate because it was a long formal process, everything had to go through the courts, it was expensive, it took forever. When the probate code was revamped, they made the process a lot easier, a lot more streamline. And probate really is not that difficult. And if it’s a usual case, it’s not that expensive. So that is where there was a popularity of trust because people want to avoid probate, but I don’t think that’s as important right now.

But when I say you can pay for it now or pay for it later, if you just have a will and the will has to be probated, you’ll have to pay to probate the will, to go to court, and then you’ll have to transfer property and then all these other things after the death of the person. With respect to a trust, all of these transfers occur. Everything gets transferred into the trust. And to me, in my mind, in the typical case, the same expenses you would pay to transfer everything into a trust are things that you would pay to transfer at the time when you’re probating a case.

So from my perspective, I think that a trust does have some very useful needs. One of the things it can do is if you have some very wealthy clients, there’s a lot of tax reasons to have trusts. But for most people, what a trust can allow you to do is maybe provide you some privacy when you die because a trust doesn’t have to be filed with the court, but you can pretty much do with a trust with what you would want to do with a will.

To me, it depends upon what your objectives are. I think they’re both valid in certain situations, valid to use ’em I should say. If I draft them, I hope they’re valid. But I think that, like I say, depending upon your situation and your objectives, one or the other should work fine.

Minneapolis Family Law, Real Estate & Estate Planning Attorney John Brandt, talks about the advantages of a trust compared to a will.

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