March 09, 2021
Legacy or Castle Trust – What Happens When Someone Passes Away With a Legacy Trust or Castle Trust?
Legacy or Castle Trust Estate Planning. What happens when someone passes away with a Legacy Trust or Castle Trust? Join Atty. Chris Berry in this episode of Daily Wisdom to know why.
Estate Attorney and Advisor Chris Berry of Castle Wealth Group answers questions on retirement and estate planning every Wednesday at 1pm. Register via this link or give our office a call at 844-885-4200.
Castle Wealth Group and Christopher Berry help families with estate planning, elder law, retirement planning, and tax planning from their offices in Brighton, Ann Arbor, Livonia, Bloomfield Hills, and Novi.
Castle Wealth Group helps families with their legal, financial, and tax planning for their retirement and legacy.
With the use of legal structures like revocable living trusts, Castle Trusts (asset protection trusts), Chris Berry and Castle Wealth Group can help your family plan, protect, and preserve what is important through their Retirement and Legacy Blueprint Process.
For more info visit:
https://castlewealthlegal.com/home
https://michiganestateplanning.com/
Episode Transcript
Administering an Estate Plan
It boils down to what we call estate administration. So how do you administer an estate when someone passes?
Well, first we have to organize the assets and figure out how do assets transfer out of someone’s name. So first, if there’s anything joints, and a lot of times with a married couple they’re going to own a lot of things through joint ownership, whether it’s a house, whether it’s checking/savings account. So when one spouse passes it goes to the survivor.
Second, would be through beneficiary designations. So this is if you have an IRA 401k life insurance it goes to whoever you’ve named as a beneficiary. A lot of times when we set up a trust, we name the trust as the beneficiary or the owner of these different things. So if an asset doesn’t pass through joint ownership beneficiary designation trust, then it ends up going into probate. And that’s what we want to try to avoid at the end of the day.
The Process
So the process for doing this is really always the same, is that you go to the funeral home or wherever that it’s handled through, they’re going to get you some death certificates. Typically, you get, say, 10 death certificates or as many assets as you have. And then you’re going out to the different financial institutions, or if we’re helping you manage the money we’ll obviously take care of it for you. But you send in the death certificates to different financial institutions.
And then if you have a trust you have to follow the terms of the trust. And so if it is a Legacy Trust or Castle Trust that says it doesn’t go outright to that individual, but instead it’s held in trust for them, well, instead of it being held in John Smith’s name, it’s now the Ed Smith Trust for the benefit of John Smith. And so what the individual or trustee would do is open up a new account now in the name of the trust, and it would have a tax ID number. This is all things that we could help you with. But instead of it being in John Smith’s name it’s now the Ed Smith Trust for the benefit of John Smith. And then as long as John Smith investing keeps it inside of that trust, it’s protected from divorces, lawsuits, et cetera.
So really it doesn’t complicate things too much to have it held in trust for the benefit of a beneficiary versus having it outright. And the advantages again, of having it in the trust is that whatever they keep inside of the trust would be protected from divorces, lawsuits, creditors. Then if they pass away the money stays in the bloodline. It wouldn’t go to any in-laws, who we call outlaws, at the end of day.