Experienced Sacramento Estate Planning Attorneys
Your living trust is a living document and should change as your life, circumstances and assets change. We include in all of our trust packages a free trust review every two years for all of our clients, if they should so choose.
If you are not yet one of our clients please contact our office for a free initial trust review, we will review your documents for completeness, accuracy and to make sure they are up to date with today’s laws and with your current situation.
If minor changes are needed we can draft living trust amendments to your trust thus updating it. Sometimes a restatement of a trust may be needed, a trust restatement will keep your old trust’s funding date so that if you kept up with your funding you will not need to do it over again but the content and language of your trust and other documents will change to comply with today’s standards and laws. Otherwise sometimes we will revoke your old trust and make a new trust entirely, complete with funding, this is necessary if the cost of amendments proves to be more expensive than the cost of a new trust itself, which often happens.
Amendments to your Living Trust
Amending a living trust is usually easier then revoking and recreating the trust with different clauses in it, because the revocation-option would require to transfer the property of the old trust to the new one. Therefore living trust amendments are quite common.
The Right to Amend a Living Trust
As long as the grantor of a revocable living trust is alive and mentally competent, the declaration of trust and therewith the living trust itself can be changed at any time by the grantor. If you have a shared living trust, both spouses must agree to any amendments of the living trust.
Normally no one else is entitled to amend the living trust. However the trust document can include an authority transfer clause, which explicitly grants the authority of changing the trust to a third party. These clauses are generally drafted for the case that the grantor becomes incapacitated. Authorization could for example be given to the successor trustee or the surviving spouse as far as a shared living trust is concerned.
Reasons for a Living Trust Amendment
There are plenty of reasons that require the trust document to be amended. The most frequent reason to amend a living trust is the sale of trust property. Other events, that require a change, might be a marriage or the birth of a child or a change to the distributions of your assets. The trust might have to be amended if the grantor moves to another state in order to correspond to the new state law. Another reasons might be a name change of the grantor or the death of the spouse or of a major beneficiary.
The avoidance of logical errors is even harder when more than one amendment is made. The living trust documents (original and amendments) can then be confused very easily. Therefore this is why lawyers (including us) tend to draft a restated version of the trust document, that substitutes the former declaration of trust for the consolidated one.
Experienced Sacramento Living Trust Attorneys
We are experienced Sacramento Estate Planning Attorneys. We have helped hundreds of individuals and families plan for the inevitable through estate planning techniques including the preparation of revocable and irrevocable living trusts, spendthrift trusts, special needs trusts, wills, powers of attorney for medical and business, living wills, medical directives, and guardianship provisions for minor children.
We are also experienced Sacramento probate and Sacramento trust administration attorneys and understand the difficulties of settling estates once your loved one has passed. Our estate planning attorneys are experienced and caring and will walk you through how to make and express some of the difficult decisions you need to make. You will have a great sense of relief and satisfaction once your estate planning documents have been finalized. Our Sacramento estate planning attorneys can guide you with great legal advice and the strategy needed to get you the results you want. Contact us today to schedule your complimentary attorney consultation by clicking HERE or by calling 916-999-1376. We look forward to helping you with all of your Sacramento estate planning needs.
