A lot of people first visit an estate planning attorney’s office without really knowing a lot about trusts and other estate planning elements. In Florida, this is very common, and it’s not something you need to worry about.
What you do need to worry about, however, are the common myths and misperceptions about a lot of estate planning tools that are floating around out there. One of these myths holds that a trust in Florida is something that only rich people need to worry about. For example, some popular notions of trusts hold that if you aren’t a wealthy grandparent who wants to leave your grandchild a large and substantial inheritance, there’s no need for you to consider creating one.
This kind of misinformation is not only wrong, it’s potentially damaging. The legal reality is that there are numerous types of trusts available to you as you go through the estate planning process. While some of these might not fit your needs, there are other types that probably do. Regardless of the amount of wealth you currently have or your individual estate planning goals, it’s almost a certainty that one or more types of trusts will fit into your estate plan. Here’s why.
Useful For Many Purposes
In Florida, you can create a trust by including a simple paragraph in your will, or by creating a separate document that will take effect almost immediately. Through your trusts you can protect a young child’s inheritance, ensure that your estate will avoid the necessity of having to go before a Florida probate court, or even minimize how much your estate will have to pay in estate taxes. You can use trusts to benefit a child with special needs. You can use a trust to establish a family foundation. You can use trust to, in short, do more than you could ever hope without them.
Essential
Even the most simple estate plan will likely use one or more types of trusts. The fact is, trusts provide certain benefits that other estate planning tools cannot. For example, creating a simple living trust will give you the ability to avoid much, if not all, of the probate process. Though probate isn’t as difficult as most people believe it to be, it is a needless expense that you can easily avoid by creating the right type of trust. In effect, choosing not to create a trust is choosing to leave your family with unnecessary headaches after you are gone.
Flexible
Depending on the type of trust you create you can choose to change them or revoke your trusts whenever you like. Trusts can be as flexible or as rigid as you need them to be, and you can create different trusts for different purposes. Contact your attorney to learn more about these essential estate planning tools in Florida.
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