How does a trust fit into my estate plan? What makes it a plan? I’m Sarah Siedentopf.

I’m an estate planning attorney in Atlanta, Georgia. A trust fulfills several roles. It fulfills the easy asset management if you are incapacitated and need some help. It also does the after you’re gone, who should get what, when, under what circumstances, who’s in charge of that. And then, it also avoids probate, so it makes the process easier and smoother for who gets what and when after you pass. The other parts of your plan that you’re going to need are a will with, so when we have a trust, we have what’s called a pour-over will.

Hopefully, everything made it into your trust, but if something didn’t, then the pour-over will guides it through probate and gets it into your trust. The financial power of attorney is for the, “I can’t make my own legal and financial decisions. Somebody needs to be able to do that for me.”

The medical power of attorney, the advance directive for healthcare here in Georgia says who should make your decisions medically if you can’t make them for yourself. And then, the designation of standby guardian says who is in charge of taking your children, your minor children, if there’s an emergency.

We also have some extra things like HIPAA authorizations that make that medical information easier; funeral designations, to make sure the right people are in charge of making those choices. And then with that, you’re gonna have ancillary pieces like deeds, transferring your real estate into the trust, assignment of personal assets to get personal property assets into the trust, maybe an assignment of LLC interest or other assignments, beneficiary designations or payable on death beneficiary, or even account updates for getting things into your trust.

These are very important because a completely empty trust isn’t very helpful at all. It’s zero-amount helpful.

Those are the important parts, and that is how trust fits into the plan. And the fact that there are multiple pieces covering multiple different things is what makes it a plan rather than just a trust. If you’d like to create a trust or a whole plan, please give me a call, and please also like and subscribe, thanks.