Types Of Trusts You Might Want In Your Estate Plan

Trusts are a powerful tool for estate planning in California. Here at CC LawGroup, A Professional Corporation, we can help you sort through your options and determine exactly which ones are right for your unique situation. We give you the time and attention you deserve, working hard to find out exactly how a trust can best serve your interests. Then our lawyers use their 25+ years of estate planning experience to draft a document that meets your needs.

To help you get started before you meet with our multilingual, full-service firm in Newark, here are five types of trusts you may want to consider:

Irrevocable Trusts

With an irrevocable trust, even though the money is in a trust, you cannot cancel it or modify it at all without getting the beneficiary to agree. This strips you of rights to your own assets. This can be incredibly helpful in reducing the taxable value of the estate if you were just going to leave those assets to the beneficiary anyway.

Revocable Trusts

As you may have guessed, a revocable trust can be modified or canceled. The assets only really transfer to your heir when you pass away. The benefit is that you can still get the income from the trust while you are alive, since you still control it.

Special Needs Trusts

The major benefit of a special needs trust is that, unlike leaving assets directly, it is not going to ruin the person’s eligibility for government assistance. This allows you to provide support for that heir while still letting him or her gather important benefits, such as Medicaid or Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

Charitable Trusts

A charitable trust gives you an easy way to leave assets to a charity of your choice, but you retain some control of when payouts occur and how much is given. Many people use these not just to help the charity, but to reduce the tax burden of the estate.

Spendthrift Trusts

A spendthrift trust ensures that your heirs will not waste your estate. You can give them annual payouts that are far smaller than the total value of the trust. For instance, rather than leaving someone $3 million all at once, you could leave the $3 million in a trust that pays out once a year for the next 10 years.

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