The answer, of course, is: Medina Law Group, YourLawyers4Life.

Here is the video:

Posted by Victor J. Medina, Medina Law Group

Trusts come in myriad forms, but for middle-class families, the living trust is popular because the person creating the trust can enjoy lifetime benefits. You can deposit assets in your own trust and ask the trustee to manage them prudently and pay the income to you, so you have more time for hobbies, travel and family.

Later, there are other important advantages. The property in a living trust that survives you can avoid the costs, publicity and delays of probate and speed property distribution to your spouse or other beneficiaries. If you choose, the trust can continue for their benefit in order to provide sound investment management and reliable financial support.

What Is a Living Trust, Anyway?

Unlike a trust you might establish by will, a living trust is set up by a written agreement between you and the trustee, and it takes effect immediately.

While you can be your own trustee, you may prefer to name a professional trustee to manage the trust assets, keep good records, pay you a regular income and—should you become incapacitated—pay your household and medical bills.

A living trust can be revocable or irrevocable. The advantage of a revocable trust is that you don’t give up control—you can amend its terms or even cancel it whenever you wish. On the other hand, you may want to put some of your assets in an irrevocable trust so you can achieve other significant goals.

For example, you could set up a charitable remainder trust to pay yourself a dependable income for your lifetime and then distribute the remaining principal to our organization. The substantial, current income tax savings as well as future estate tax savings of this kind of trust magnify its appeal.

Your Estate Plan, Too

A revocable living trust can be an important part of your estate plan. It’s an ideal vehicle for holding title to real estate outside your home state. You can make your life insurance payable to your trust. And the trust can include a credit shelter trust provision to help minimize estate taxes and other provisions to make gifts to family and charitable beneficiaries.

Along with your attorney, we can show you how a living trust can blend your personal needs, estate plans and philanthropic intentions.

SOURCE: University of Georgia in an article written by Mary L. McCormack

Of course, no one doing the reporting is an estate planning attorney, so they didn’t mention the likelihood that there were likely ZERO assets owned in his individual name. The Family Trust referenced in his Will was likely created before he died and, if he did the right thing, his assets were funded into that trust. (The Family Trust was probably a living trust. Living trusts are like buckets. Funding is the process of taking your assets and putting them in the bucket.).

Instead of tearing apart the Will, dissecting the provisions of the guardianship nomination, I want to spend a few paragraphs discussing all of the right moves that Michael Jackson made in planning his estate. (I’m more of a “glass-half-full” kinda guy.)

First, he created a living trust and funded his assets into the trust. Back in the days where you could eat 6 days a week on a lawyer’s dime listening to a living trust seminar (the same rubber chicken meal, for sure), people were flocking to lawyers to have these magic books created.

What happened then, and what still happens often in estate planning, is that the lawyers left the job of funding the trust to clients, without any guidance (or at least, guidance that wasn’t billed hourly) from the lawyer. Personally, I think that’s a terrible way to practice and so we’re very diligent about making sure that our client’s trusts are funded.

If you visit a traditional estate planning attorney, clients are sent home with a nice, leather-bound book and a letter saying, “Now go move your assets into the trust.” This is hardly the best way to serve a client. Regardless, I’m hoping that Michael went with a great estate planning attorney that made sure that the assets were funded into the Family Trust.

We’ll soon learn whether the trust was fully funded because if Michael Jackson owned any assets in his individual name, they’ll have to go through probate to be put into the Family Trust — and we’ll see just how good his estate planning was.

Second, as a parent of young children, Michael likely separated the responsibility of caring for the kids from the caring of the money. (Again, we don’t know for sure because the Family Trust is a private document.) When I counsel clients with minor kids, I tell them that the only way to make sure that they money they leave for their children (through term life insurance or otherwise) is to keep the guardian’s hands off the spigot. That means having one person serve as guardian and a totally different person serve as trustee of the Trust created for the kids’ benefit.

As you can see, if you have the same person serving both roles, there is chance that the funds will be depleted before the kids are done being raised. Just as important, you will have lost control over the assets that you left for your children’s benefit. This issue is not so much about trust, but about control and taking every step that the assets you took time to plan to leave for your loved ones are there when they need them.

While we don’t know exactly who is named as a trustee, Michael likely kept those roles separate and therefore made it much more likely that the money will be used correctly for his children’s benefit and will last throughout their lifetime.

Third, his Family Trust afforded him the opportunity to keep his affairs private. We already know how fiercely private Michael Jackson was. If he died early, there would like be a frenzy of publicity digging into his life, his finances, etc. By creating a living trust, he’s been able to minimize the effect of his death as to access of his affairs. And you can see the fruits of this in the way that no one has been able to report what is in the Trust, who the trustees are, and who gets what, etc.

Now, it may be that one day the document is leaked, but the difference is that the Will was required to be filed as a public document, whereas the Trust is a completely private document. Unless you are a mega celebrity, the people that you trust with your assets (like your lawyer and your trustees) will be able to keep that secret and your affairs private. Even when predators come in to see if they can get some of those hard-earned financial assets that you left for your children.

Finally, Michael planned before it was too late. It’s unfortunate that it takes a tragedy for us to act — and it’s even worse that people will say “I need to so something” now and forget about it in a few weeks.

Unfortunately, tragedy knows no economy. The time is now for you to plan. As an estate planning attorney, father and husband, I’m thrilled to see that Michael Jackson did some good planning before he died.

I’m hosting a workshop on July 12th at 4pm at The Little Gym-West Windsor. If you are thinking about taking action and planning your estate, you owe it to yourself to attend. Here is the link for more information — Kids Protection Planning Workshop

Posted by Victor J. Medina
Personal Family Lawyer

So, as you talk to your family and prepare them for the eventual transition of your estate to your loved one, make sure that you discount the value of that property by 3–5% to account for the fees.

Now, I said that last sentence with a fair amount of sarcasm. The reason is that paying those fees is a voluntary act. With some simple estate planning, you can make sure that your entire estate is passed on to loved ones from within the confines of your trusted legal counselor’s office.

By creating a living trust, you can pass title to the house from you to loved ones privately and in exactly the manner you choose. An effective estate plan should help you:

Give what you want,

To whom you want,

When you want them to have it,

In the way you want them to have it.

So, as you travel to your summer home and start the process of “opening” the house (you know, turning the electricity on, flushing the water lines, etc.), think about the housekeeping you should be doing to make sure that your property is transferred to your loved ones as smoothly and with as little fees and necessary.

Posted by Victor J. Medina,

Medina, Martinez & Castroll, LLC

When people learn that I am an estate planning attorney, I usually get asked this question: “Should I have a will or a living trust?” Then, conversation usually turns to what the prospective client heard could or would happen with one or the other. It’s as if I’m a surgeon and the patient is telling me what they “heard” were the advantages of using one stitching procedure over another.

I usually surprise them by telling them that they should get neither. You see, estate planning is not about the documents, it’s about the RESULTS.

Whether you have a will or a living trust doesn’t matter if the plan isn’t tailored to meet your goals!

Estate Planning Without Counselling? That’s Crazy

T

here are a lot of estate planning attorneys in New Jersey. However, I’ll be brave enough to say that what passes for estate planning in America is little more than word processing. Estate planners, eager to engage a client, hear that a client wants “it” (whether “it” is a will or a living trust) and then proceeds to fill out one of three forms. However, without counselling (note the Old English spelling), that will or trust could be the wrong vehicle for that situation.

Let me ask a question: What do you think of a doctor who prescribes a drug simply because the patient saw a commercial on TV? Why should estate planning be any different?

Estate planning needs to be an ongoing process that centers on the client’s goals.

I apologize that the link is coming from TMZ (a bit exploitive), but it’s worth it to show what happens with proper planning. Rather than hear a story about how someone failed to provide for people after their death, or learn the intimate details of who was getting what, when and how (traditional, public wills) — we get a will that says exactly what it should say: everything left to the living trust.

Now, I can only hope that there were few or no assets left in Crichton’s individual name. (A proper trust is one that is fully-funded with the decedent’s assets.) Assuming that’s true, Crichton accomplished a few, incredible things. First, he totally or near totally avoided the time and expense of probating a will. If he owned property in more than one state (as the wealthy often do) and transferred title to the living trust, he avoided having to probate each of those properties in the states where they lie.

Second, he ensured that the administration of his estate took more like 15 minutes than 15 months. Third, he left a portion of his estate totally and completely protected from creditors and predators.

Actually, I can go on and on with the benefits, but it makes me so happy (really it does) to see someone has invested the time and money while they were still alive to make the transition smoother for them in the future.

As I say to my clients all the time, it’s much easier for you to take care of these things while you’re alive and well than it will ever be for your family to do it when you’re gone, if you don’t.

Finally, check out the comments on that news piece I posted — there was someone who recognized that he did some proper planning.

News stories like these make me proud to be a Personal Family Lawyer.

1) What is a living trust?

Well, breaking it down, a trust is simply an arrangement under which one person, called a trustee, holds legal title to something for another person, called a beneficiary. By the way, there is nothing to prevent the same person from both being the beneficiary and serving as the trustee. A “living” trust, by extension, is just a trust you create during your lifetime, as compared with one that is created by your will upon your death. You can use living trusts to avoid probate or plan for estate tax.

2) How do living trusts avoid probate?

For background, probate is the legal process for sorting out the affairs of an individual has died. (That statement is a major simplification, but bear with me). The process is often time consuming, expensive and exposes the deceased individual’s affairs to public scrutiny. For many reasons, avoiding probate is a desirable thing.

Living trusts avoid probate because legal title in the assets are held by the living trust and so there is no need to sort out ownership after the grantor’s death. The living trust has a provision for who will serve as trustee in the event that the grantor was serving as the trustee during his/her lifetime.

Well, that’s “living trusts” in a nutshell. There’s a lot more here to talk about, maybe we’ll explore some more basic concepts in the near future.