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When and How to Add or Remove Real Estate to a Living Trust

A living trust is a crucial component of estate planning, offering numerous benefits such as avoiding probate, maintaining privacy, and providing control over your assets. One of the most significant assets people often include in their living trusts is real estate. However, life circumstances change, and there may come a time when you need to update your living trust to add or remove real estate. In this article, we’ll explore when and how to make these changes, and introduce a convenient solution: GetDynasty’s subscription service for transferring your house into a trust.

When to Update Your Living Trust for Real Estate

  1. Buying or Selling Property: Whenever you acquire or dispose of a real estate asset, you should update your trust to reflect these changes. This ensures that the new property is protected under the trust and that any sold property is removed.

  2. Change in Personal Circumstances: Life events such as marriage, divorce, or the birth of a child may necessitate changes to your trust. For example, you might want to add a new spouse’s property or remove an ex-spouse’s property.

  3. Relocation: If you move to a different state, it’s essential to review and possibly update your trust to comply with the new state’s laws, especially if you’re buying a new home there.

  4. Refinancing: If you refinance a property in your trust, you may need to temporarily remove it from the trust to complete the process, then add it back once the refinancing is complete.

  5. Estate Planning Updates: Regularly reviewing your estate plan, including your living trust, ensures that it aligns with your current wishes and circumstances.

How to Add or Remove Real Estate from Your Living Trust

  1. Review Your Trust Document: Start by reviewing your trust document to understand the process outlined for amending the trust.

  2. Prepare a Trust Amendment or Restatement: For minor changes, a trust amendment may suffice. However, for significant changes, a complete restatement of the trust may be necessary.

  3. Transfer the Property: To add real estate to your trust, you’ll need to execute a new deed transferring the property from your name to the trust’s name. To remove property, you’ll execute a deed transferring the property out of the trust.

  4. Record the Deed: The new deed must be recorded with the county recorder’s office where the property is located to make the transfer official.

  5. Update Your Trust Schedule: Your trust should have a schedule of assets. Update this schedule to reflect the addition or removal of the property.

Simplifying the Process with GetDynasty

Managing real estate transactions within your living trust can be complex, but GetDynasty’s subscription service can simplify the process. With GetDynasty, you can easily transfer your house into your trust, ensuring it’s properly protected and aligned with your estate planning goals. Their experts can guide you through the process, ensuring that all legal requirements are met and that your trust remains up-to-date with your real estate holdings.

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What is a Trust?

A Living Trust is a financial tool that lets you plan, organize, and protect your life. It’s a personal entity that allows you to add assets and plan out your inheritance. Eliminating legal battles, cost, and time spent by your loved ones. 

Think of it like a personal LLC that you put everything you own in. Except it doesn’t protect you from liability like an LLC does, it protects you from probate and conservatorship. 

Probate is the complicated court process (12-18 months) where a judge decides what happens to your assets after you die, become incapacitated, or are “deemed” incapable. Creating a living trust allows your assets to completely circumvent probate and immediately transfer to your loved ones. 

In addition to being able to name heirs (your beneficiaries), a Trust also allows you to assign someone to manage it (your successor trustee). Instead of going through probate, your Successor Trustee takes control of the Trust, handles your affairs, and distributes your assets according to your instructions. The person you select as Successor Trustee should be your most trusted person. Like a best friend or closest family member.

At Dynasty, we believe everyone should have a Living Trust. If you have children, assets, or plan to acquire assets in the future, you should create a Trust. That way when you buy your next home, open a bank or brokerage account, get startup shares, etc. – you can immediately title them in your trust.