Imagine that you – a proactive and careful California planner – take steps to ensure your active control of assets during your lifetime. Moreover, your close collaboration with a proven estate planning attorney also ensures that your property will be distributed to heirs and loved ones following your death according to your wishes.
Those dual objectives are routinely promoted through a planner’s execution of a revocable living trust. That legal instrument is impressively flexible and protective, allowing a planner to maintain total control of trust property while alive and have it pass at a future date exactly as intended.
Moreover, living trust assets are beyond the state’s reach in the probate process and allow for maximum privacy. Readers can examine some of the relevant details attached to living trusts on our website at the Law Offices of Connie, PC.
What happens if a planner forgets to include assets in a living trust and/or accumulates additional property following its creation that is not added to trust assets?
Enter the so-called “pour-over” will, an instrument designed to specifically address that possibility and preclude unintended consequences regarding a planner’s assets. A pour-over will essentially captures all of a planner’s pre-death assets and pours them into an already established trust. As an article on pour-over wills duly stresses, the purpose of such an instrument “is to guarantee the assets that weren’t included in the trust will be transferred.”
An experienced estate administration attorney can provide further information, and would likely visit the topic of pour-over wills during a discussion of living trusts in any case. The two instruments can work together in an optimally seamless and protective way.