1. Your Last Will and Testament and the details of your estate holdings and its distribution will not be an open public record in the clerk’s office of the Surrogates Court.
  2. The trustee of your Revocable Living Trust will not need to probate your Will in multiple states in order to transfer your home, vacation home and rental properties located in New York, Florida and Maine.
  3. Your trustee will not need to pay court fees or legal fees to probate your Will.
  4. Your trustee can start to collect and distribute your assets soon after your death rather than having to wait three months or more for your Will to be admitted to probate and having to wait another seven months for the creditors of your estate to file claims for debts owed to them. If there is estate litigation connected with probating your will, the wait for distribution of probate assets can be even longer.
  5. The trustee of your Revocable Living Trust when making distribution of your trust assets according to your estate plan will not need to give notice of the distribution to relatives that you wish to exclude from involvement with your estate.
  6. The Trustee of your Revocable Living Trust will not need to pay for and publish a notice of the probate of your Will in an attempt to locate unknown relatives that may not even exist. This is often required with estates being distributed pursuant to a Will where there are no immediate family members of the decedent.
  7. When you become incapacitated or even earlier, if you choose, your successor trustee to the Revocable Living Trust can take over the management of your trust assets creating the likelihood for preservation and growth of your assets until they are distributed according to your plan.
  8. By funding your Revocable Living Trust when it is created and while you are still competent your assets are smoothly placed into the trust, avoiding the bank challenges that frequently occur with assets transferred on your behalf by an agent using a Power of Attorney after you have become incapacitated.
  9. The trustee of your Revocable Living Trust is likely to have many fewer cash flow issues related to your trust assets because of your death than will the executor of your probate estate. The trust assets will be more readily available to the trustee in the weeks and months immediately after your death than are assets in a probate estate.
  10. You are likely to discuss your Revocable Living Trust with your family well before your   They are likely to know what the trust assets are, how they will be distributed and who the trustee will be after your death.  Discussions of this type prior to your death help keep harmony among family members after you are gone.

You can do the same estate planning with regard to distribution of assets, tax planning, special needs planning with a Revocable Living Trust as you can with a Last Will and Testament.  In many ways a Revocable Living Trust may better fit your needs than a Will. If you do not have a Will or a Revocable Living Trust, or if you have not reviewed your estate planning documents in the last two or three years I urge you to consult an attorney to make sure that you estate planning needs are properly covered and up to date.

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