Hi, I’m Sarah Siedentopf. I’m an estate planning and probate attorney in Atlanta, Georgia.
How do you put assets into a trust?
Now, when you create a trust it’s almost like a box. The trust agreement is the box, but it’s empty. You have to put things into it. What kind of things do people put into trust? The first and obvious one is real estate. Many, many people put real estate into trusts and we all know that in order to transfer the ownership of real estate you need a deed. So, your deed would transfer the ownership of the property from you personally to yourself as trustee of your trust, assuming that you are the trustee or to whatever person is the trustee. In the past, if you transferred the property to your trust as opposed to the trustee of the trust, your transfer failed, because it has to be a person owning the property.
Georgia just did a new law July 1st, 2018, that addresses this because it was a problem that happened so often, and now if you transfer property to the trust only, rather than to the trustee, as the trustee of the trust, they will assume that you’ve done it to the trustee. So that’s the first thing — property. You might want to put a car or a boat; these things also have titles. You will transfer ownership through the title to the trustee of the trust. You might want to put an IRA or retirement account. You will have to do paperwork with the holder of the account transferring that property to the trustee of the trust and now it’ll need to be so-and-so as trustee of the so-and-so trust, not just somebody’s name. You don’t want to accidentally transfer it to your brother or your mother. But personal property… so we’ve talked about things that have titles or deeds.
How about personal property? How does personal property get into your trust?
You would actually sign a piece of paper assigning your personal property to your trust. It would have to be witnessed and notarized, just like the trust instrument. But even this personal property that doesn’t have a title needs to have something stating that it has been transferred into your trust. I think the last thing we haven’t talked about is bank accounts. Once again, you’d have to go into the institution and fill out their paperwork to transfer your bank account from your name to the trustee of the trust. If you’ve got any more questions about transferring property, I’d love to talk to you. Thank you.
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