It’s a common misunderstanding: you’ve signed and notarized your trust, and you feel like you can check “estate planning” off your to-do list. Unfortunately, that’s only part of the process. One crucial step often gets overlooked: funding your trust.
Funding is the process of ensuring your assets are properly titled. This could mean transferring ownership of your home to your trust or updating beneficiary designations on your accounts. It’s not glamorous, but it’s essential if you want your estate plan to work the way you intended.
Here’s the surprising part: most people don’t complete this step correctly. Over the last three years, we reviewed the estate plans of clients who had originally worked with other law firms. Roughly 94% of them had funding issues. That’s not a typo—94%!
Some of these mistakes were minor, but others were significant enough to put the integrity of the entire estate plan at risk. For example, many hadn’t completed what I call the “low-hanging fruit” of funding: transferring their home into their trust.
When funding isn’t done properly, it can mean that one of your primary goals—avoiding probate—isn’t achieved. Assets not titled correctly may still have to go through probate, which is exactly the time-consuming and expensive process your trust was designed to prevent.
That’s why it’s so important to revisit your estate plan after signing it. Take the time to confirm that each of your assets is either titled in the name of your trust or has the correct beneficiary designation. More importantly, what has changed?
Don’t let an incomplete step undo all the hard work you’ve done to protect your loved ones. Take the time to get it right—your future self (and your family) will thank you. If you feel that your trust is not funded correctly, or funded at all, please contact Kent Brown at Strong & Hanni by either phone at (801) 532-7080 or email at: kbrown@strongandhanni.com or go to https://activerain.com/profile/kbrowndad for additional information, or my personal Strong & Hanni webpage at: https://strongandhanni.com/attorneys/attorney-kent-brown/