George Boutwell

[glgillis]

From posts in a previous "era", I think you and I have similar views on Living Trusts. To me, they are like locusts-get them stomped out in one area and they reappear somewhere else. They are making the rounds in my area. I know you are well read on a lot of legal subjects and wonder if you could point me to a good article or analysis that I can read up on? I know I could Google it and wade through a few thousand topics, but am hoping your expertise can shorten the process.

Thanks, Gerald

[George Boutwell]

Bridge Club Chatter

Please see my forthcoming book, "How To Avoid Living Trusts," which reveals a historically proven method, based on early English law, for settling a decedent's estate. I don't want to give out too many clues about this process, but it starts with a P.

But of course, since everyone else with whom your client plays cards has a Living Trust, no amount of reasoning will convince them that they may not need one.

My observation is that 90% of the people with an inter vivos trust (hard to market with their Latin name) do not need one, while 90% of the people who need one don't have one.

It is true that it depends on your state of residence. In New York, California and other states with archaic laws, there may be more justification for them. Unfortunately, much of the national media are controlled from those two states, so you find writers in Manhattan, NYC, telling people in Manhattan, Kansas, how to plan their estate.

The questions I love are from the people with 90% of their net worth in rollover IRA's. They are shocked to learn that they cannot put an IRA into a living trust. Some of them end up naming their trust as beneficiary of retirement accounts, which is seldom the right choice.

In other cases living trusts do no harm, but they give their grantors a false sense of security that just because they have overpaid for some word-processing boilerplate, their estate administration will be copasetic. I suggest to those who attend the free-coffee-and-cookies seminars where trusts are marketed that they ask politely at the end of the presentation, "Can a living trust be contested after I die? What court would hear the case? What law applies?"

The answers, at least in my state, is yes, and the case ends up in probate court, where the rules are the same as if the decedent had left a will instead. The word "probate" has negative connotations mostly because of what we have all heard about contested probates. As more living trust grantors die off, we will hear more about contested living trusts.

Sources for objective information on living trusts? Here's a place to start, which also has some links to other good sources.

http://evans-legal.com/dan/revtrust.html

"How To Avoid Living Trusts" is expected to be published after final work is completed on my next book, "Lemmings Leaping Cliffs: The Truth About LLC's."

[veritas]

I think I'm going

to enjoy your posts.

[glgillis]

Thank you

for yor reply. Will check out the site tonight.