PostShow: TRUSTS!!! We are taking trust today fresh off the Charlotte today experience. Get the Trust Planning Map FREE at: mcelderlaw.com/trustmap.
Greg McIntyre: Hey, this is Greg McIntyre with McIntyre Elder Law, helping seniors protect their assets and legacies. I’m here at NBC, WCNC in Charlotte, we just finished the Charlotte Today Show. We were talking about trust planning. What’s the difference between wills and trust? We only had a few minutes to talk about that. So I wanted to come on and expand on that a little bit. We call this the post show, or the postgame, and talk about trust.
Trust are great planning tools. We handle special needs trust, which are amazing planning tools that can allow for people to… with disabilities to have money to be spent on them and not affect, say an SSI, a disability payment or Medicaid Healthcare that comes along with it. Also, people may reach a point where they need trust for tax planning, or it really depends on your goal.
So what we did was, Taylor and I – and Taylor’s filming right now, I appreciate that Taylor – we made the trust planning map. This is hot off my desk literally, and it talks about the difference between your revocable and irrevocable trust. It gives you the difference, it says down below. It gives you some questions such as you’re a irrevocable trust, or we could call that a Medicaid asset protection trust if we were looking to, perhaps, pay for nursing home care or assisted living care with Medicaid, but wanted to make sure the assets were protected. A revocable living trust will not give you that option, okay,? So it shows that right at the top. And then, which one is best for you? Do you want control or do you want protection? Well, you could have more control as the trustee with a revocable living trust, right here, or more protection with a irrevocable trust.
So really wanted to get that down and talk about control of assets, tax separately or the same as you. Revocable living trusts can be taxed the same as your personal income. Irrevocable trust have a separate tax ID number. It’s actually EIN number the IRS makes you get to tag the taxes on the income generated in the trust because a trust may need an income tax return at the end of the year if there’s certain gains.
With an irrevocable trust, you have a third party trustee. So the third party trustee means it’s not you. With a revocable trust, it’s generally you are the trustee. Irrevocable trust, it’s going to be a friend, a trusted family member. It could be an attorney or sometimes it’s a bank. Sometimes banks have trust departments that handle and manage trusts, and they have plus managers within those departments. We handle trust on a regular basis as the trustees if our clients need us to do that. Those are a couple of differences.
We have many differences irrevocable and revocable trust. I always start with goals. So trust goals, one, two, three. We have a place that you can write down your goals. Is it to send people to college? Is it to make sure that the grandkids have a better chance in life or a better lot in life? Is it to preserve land and keep it in the family? There’s a lot of reasons why you might want a trust. This is so you can think about those reasons for yourself and write those there. We talk about the wills a little bit too, and how those work with trust.
So, generally, a will is written along with a trust as a pour over will. The will is written to pour over assets, not in the trust while you’re alive, into the trust at that point. So you need to be conscious and aware of that if there are any liens that could attach to the property that are going through the court probate process through a will to be poured over into the trust. All those things are individual to you and your family that you need to think about or see a professional and talk about.
So this is a good way to get started. To get this, you can go to mcelderlaw.com/trust, mcelderlaw.com/trustmap, and you’ll also receive a free copy… ebook and audio book copy of Saving the Farm: A Practical Guide to the Legal Maze of Aging in America, that I wrote, that talks more in depth about trust and other legal concepts to help you protect your hard earned money and property for you and your family. Thank you so much for watching and listening. We’ll come to you again regularly, at least once a week, with great information for you and your family. Have a great day.
