03 Jan Living Trust: Make it Your New Year’s Resolution
This is the time of year when we wake up to a huge dose of reality. The holidays are over, spring is months away, and it seems there’s nothing to look forward to but diets, bills and taxes.
New Year’s resolutions: making promises to ourselves
Yet a New Year represents new opportunities, a time for a fresh start. You may or may not make formal New Year’s resolutions, yet I believe we all make at least silent promises to ourselves that we’ll change some of our behaviors. We may promise to spend more time with our families, be more tolerant of those with whom we disagree, kinder and more generous to those who have less. And who among us doesn’t start every year promising to eat a healthier diet, exercise more and lose weight?
Creating a Living Trust in 2017
January is the time when we get a lot of calls from Living Trust clients who are following through on one of their New Year’s resolutions: creating a Trust, Power of Attorney and Advance Healthcare Directive. Preparing a Living Trust—or updating the one you have—is one of the best gifts you can give your family. A thoughtfully prepared Trust that identifies the distribution of not only your assets but those items that have sentimental value for your loved ones can help avoid anxiety and conflict at what will surely be a stressful time for your family.
What you can expect from us: A dedicated team to help you
While anyone in our three offices can help you, we have dedicated team members who work specifically with Living Trust clients, and they develop close working relationships with their clients throughout the process. They’re knowledgeable, accommodating and work hard to make sure that every client understands the process. Our team is available by phone and email to answer questions.
The Living Trust process at California Document Preparers
Most of our clients tell us that creating their Trust was a lot easier than they thought it would be. We use special attorney-approved workbooks that provide a straightforward, step-by-step process:
- Come in to one of our offices and fill out the workbook. You can save this step by purchasing the workbook from our secure, online storefront. Not to worry—we’re still here for you by phone and email if you have questions.
- We prepare all of the legal documents for you.
- If you have property that needs to be moved into the Trust, we prepare the transfer deed(s) for you.
- When your Trust is ready—generally within a week, you come in and we review the documents with you. Once you’re satisfied that everything is correct, you sign the documents and we notarize them.
- We give you a hard copy of your Living Trust and retain a soft copy/pdf file. We can email this to you if you like; many people want to be able to distribute this to their children or other family members.
- Your Trust should be updated for important life events, so we make it easy to do this for you as well, from a simple amendment to an entire restatement.
The best part: One flat fee
We don’t charge extra for phone calls, notarizing documents or if you require additional help. No surprises. This is our commitment to our clients.
If creating a Living Trust was one of your New Year’s resolutions, schedule an appointment today at one of our three Bay Area offices.