Articles Posted in Living Trust / Revocable Trust

The Wall Street Journal has an article on Deciding if Your Kid is Trust-Worthy where they discuss using trust like a Florida Estate Planning Lawyer would use to protect your families assets.

Part of the article is devoted to helping you determine if your child or your children are the best ones to manage your finances or Florida Revocable Trust in the even you become incapacitated or die. These are areas you should discuss your your Florida Estate Planning Lawyer in an effort to determine how best to structure a Florida Revocable Trust.

Estate planning can help deal with the proper use and distribution of your assets upon a disability or your death. Below are several of the advantages of using a Florida Revocable Trust for Disability and Death Planning.

DISABILITY PLANNING

No probate, so everything remains private.

You decide the criteria for your disability and you pick those who will determine whether that criteria have been met.

It seems like ever few months we hear about another company who provides living trust seminars to the public and scares them into purchasing unnecessary trusts.

Another “Trust Mill” has been found guilty of practicing law without a license by masquerading as qualified financial advisers, estate planners, lawyers, and paralegals to exploit and prey upon senior citizens with the creation and selling of unnecessary and often useless living trusts.

In this case The Estate Plan, a company operating in Texas and Arkansas, was hit with a $16 Million default judgment for fraud, unauthorized practice of law, negligence, breach of fiduciary duty and conspiracy.

Often a Florida Revocable Trust is not modified promptly upon a divorce. If the trust is subject to Florida law, Florida Statutes 736.1105 can amend the trust when the prior spouse is named as a beneficiary and the other spouse creates the trust.

736.1105 Dissolution of marriage; effect on revocable trust.–Unless the trust instrument or the judgment for dissolution of marriage or divorce expressly provides otherwise, if a revocable trust is executed by a husband or wife as settlor prior to annulment of the marriage or entry of a judgment for dissolution of marriage or divorce of the settlor from the settlor’s spouse, any provision of the trust that affects the settlor’s spouse will become void upon annulment of the marriage or entry of the judgment of dissolution of marriage or divorce and any such trust shall be administered and construed as if the settlor’s spouse had died on the date of the annulment or on entry of the judgment for dissolution of marriage or divorce.

If you have a joint trust that was not addressed in a divorce decree or anulent or have recently been divorced, you should Contact a Florida Estate Planning Lawyer to review your trust to make sure that your ex-spouse is treated as per your intentions and not what your documents state.