Disclaimer: This post is for informational purposes only and not for the purpose of providing legal advice. You should contact your attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular issue or problem.

Mr. Heels and I have been saying for years that we needed to establish a living trust and will. After putting it off for so long, we finally got around to it!  I like to think of a living trust as a safe deposit box of sorts; a trust would store all your assets just like a safe deposit box would store your valuables, and the key holder to your trust would be the trustee. The trustee is usually you and/or your spouse while you’re still alive, and you have the power to change and alter it at any time.

One of our main reasons for getting a living trust, rather than just a stand-alone will, is that we want to avoid probate. Also, a living trust can contain a will, so by setting up a living trust, we will have both. Probate is the legal process that helps take care of one’s affairs after they pass away. It typically involves paperwork, lawyers, and court appearances. Probate is time consuming and expensive, and is not something we want to put our children and relatives through when we pass away. Property under a living trust does not have to go through probate, and can be distributed by the trustee according to your wishes without having to go through the courts. We definitely want to make sure we maximize what we can pass down to our heirs once we pass away, and establishing a living trust helps us do that.

Mr. Heels has a benefit through his work called Hyatt Legal, so we went through them to get set up with a lawyer. The law firm we were referred to specializes in estate planning, so that is all they do. They don’t provide any other type of legal services. I really liked that because it meant their primary expertise was this specific area of law. They came highly recommended by several of Mr. Heels’ coworkers too, so we knew we were in good hands. Since their services were covered under Hyatt Legal, we paid no more than $200 out of pocket. The law firm we went to charges $3600 otherwise, and covers all the time and paperwork needed to establish our estate plan.

Our first step was to schedule an appointment with our lawyer. To prep for the meeting, Mr. Heels listed out all our possible assets and their worth. This included retirement accounts, college savings accounts, checking and savings accounts, our cars, and our house. They really appreciated us having all that information on-hand!

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In that first meeting, they went over all the basics on what goes into an estate plan, defined what a living trust was, and how it was different than a will. They also went over a contract that would serve as an agreement between our lawyer and us. Once we signed the contract, we started to work through the details of our living trust, which included…

  • Will – a legal document that indicates who should receive which of your assets after your death. Also allows you to name guardianship designations for your children.
  • Durable Power of Attorney – gives a designated person the authority to make medical and/or financial decisions on your behalf should you ever become mentally incapacitated.
  • Beneficiary designations – the person or legal entity that is entitled to receive the proceeds from an estate or trust.
  • Letter of Intent – contains instructions on how the estate and the descendent’s executors should care for a child.
  • Guardianship Designations – can be used to designate a guardian for yourself should you become incapacitated, and/or to designate a guardian for your child should you pass away.

To go into a little more detail, they asked questions such as who would be the primary beneficiary (first in line), contingency beneficiaries (second in line), and alternate beneficiaries (if other named beneficiaries also passed away). They asked what we wanted the distribution ages for our children to be if we both passed away (there are so many ways to go about this, and you can even set it up for them to receive things in increments). We even went through end of life decisions based on various scenarios, where they asked if we wanted to a) prolong life, b) not prolong life, c) or leave the decision up to the agent.

To drill down to all this detail, they asked “what if” on top of “what if” questions. “If both of you pass away, and then your children pass away… then what?” type questions. It was a lot to think through, and so many different questions and scenarios came up in the process.

This initial meeting took about an hour. We didn’t have all the answers in this meeting, but our lawyer said it wasn’t a problem and that she would email us all our answers, along with the ones we weren’t sure about. She emailed within a week, and once we finalized our answers, we scheduled a follow-up meeting to sign all the paperwork, and get everything notarized.  Overall, it was a pretty simple and straightforward process once we got all our answers squared away.

Did you establish a living trust and will?  What was your process like?