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Why Reviewing Your Trust Regularly Isn’t Optional—It’s Essential

You’ve taken the important step of creating an estate plan, including a trust—congratulations! This shows you care deeply about keeping your family out of court and conflict, ensuring your wishes are known and honored, and you do not want to leave behind a mess for the people you love. Great work. But you may not realize that an estate plan, a will, or a trust isn’t a “set it and forget it” type. Your estate plan is a living set of documents and tools that need regular attention to ensure they work when your loved ones need them and don’t fail at the worst possible moment.

Think about it this way: Would you still wear the same clothes you bought ten years ago without checking if they still fit? Probably not. Similarly, your estate plan, including your trust, must be reviewed regularly to ensure it still “fits” your current life situation, assets, the law, and wishes. Let’s explore why regular estate plan reviews are crucial and how often you should check in on your plan.

Life Changes and Your Trust Should, Too

Life rarely stays the same for long. Since you created your trust, you’ve likely experienced changes in your personal and financial life. Each of these changes can impact how effective your trust will be in protecting your assets and providing for your loved ones.

Consider significant life events like marriage, divorce, or the birth of children or grandchildren. These milestones fundamentally alter your family structure and potentially your wishes regarding who should benefit from your estate. For example, if you’ve recently welcomed a new grandchild, you should include them as a beneficiary. Or if you’ve gone through a divorce, you’ll likely want to remove your ex-spouse from your trust.

Your financial situation evolves as well. Perhaps you’ve purchased new property, started a business, or received an inheritance. These assets need to be appropriately incorporated into your trust. Otherwise, they may go through probate, defeating one of the primary purposes of having a trust in the first place.

Even changes in your relationships can necessitate updates to your trust. The person you appointed as a successor trustee five years ago might no longer be the best choice. Without regular reviews, your trust may not accomplish what you intend, potentially leading to conflict among your loved ones or assets being distributed in ways you never would have wanted.

Laws Change, Even When Your Wishes Don’t

Even if your situation has remained relatively stable, the legal and tax landscape constantly evolves. These changes can significantly impact how your trust operates and its effectiveness in protecting your assets.

Tax laws, in particular, frequently change with new administrations and shifting political priorities. For instance, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 doubled the federal estate tax exemption, dramatically changing estate planning considerations for many families. If your trust was created before this change, it might contain no longer necessary or beneficial provisions under current law.

State laws governing trusts and estates also change regularly. These modifications can affect everything from how your trust is administered to the rights of beneficiaries. Without regular reviews, your trust might not take advantage of beneficial new laws or run afoul of new requirements.

By reviewing your trust periodically, you can ensure it remains compliant with current laws and takes advantage of any new beneficial provisions. This proactive approach helps protect your assets and your loved ones from unexpected legal complications.

How Often Should You Review Your Trust?

Given the importance of updating your trust, you might wonder how frequently you should review it. While there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, some general guidelines can help you determine the proper schedule for your situation.

Review your trust every three to five years as a baseline, even if you don’t think anything significant has changed. This regular schedule helps ensure you don’t overlook gradual changes that might have occurred in your life, your assets, or the law.

However, certain life events should trigger an immediate review, regardless of when you last updated your trust:

  • Marriage, divorce, or the death of a spouse
  • Birth or adoption of children or grandchildren
  • Death of a named trustee, guardian, or beneficiary
  • Significant changes in your financial situation
  • Moving to a new state, as trust laws vary by state
  • Substantial changes in tax or estate planning laws

The Consequences of an Outdated Trust Can Be Severe

Failing to review and update your trust regularly can lead to serious consequences that undermine your initial reasons for creating it. These consequences can range from financial losses to family conflicts that proper planning could have avoided.

One of the most significant risks is that assets you’ve acquired since creating your trust may not be adequately funded into it. Trust funding—the process of transferring assets into your trust’s ownership—is crucial for avoiding probate. If you’ve purchased new property, opened new accounts, or acquired valuable assets without transferring them to your trust, these items will likely go through probate despite your efforts to avoid it.

An outdated trust can also result in unintended beneficiaries receiving your assets. If you haven’t updated your trust after significant life changes, your assets might go to people you no longer wish to benefit—or might not go to those you do want to include.

Family conflict is another potential consequence of an outdated trust. Unclear or outdated provisions can leave your loved ones arguing over what you intended. These disputes can damage family relationships and lead to expensive, time-consuming litigation.

Tax consequences can also arise from an outdated trust. Changes in tax laws might mean your trust no longer effectively minimizes estate taxes. Without updates to address these changes, your beneficiaries might face larger tax bills than necessary, reducing their inheritance.

Finally, reviewing your trust doesn’t always mean you must make changes. Sometimes, you’ll find that your current trust still perfectly reflects your wishes and circumstances. Even then, the review process is valuable for refreshing your understanding of your plan and giving you peace of mind.

Don’t Leave Your Family’s Future to Chance

Your trust is more than just a legal document—it reflects your care for your loved ones and your desire to provide for them even when you’re no longer here. By reviewing your trust regularly, you demonstrate that same care and foresight. You also save your loved ones from confusion, conflict, and costly legal proceedings during a difficult time.

I’m here to support you in this ongoing process. Reviewing legal documents isn’t high on anyone’s list of favorite activities. Still, I work to make the process as simple and painless as possible and build it into my ongoing service once we work together. Don’t leave your family’s future to chance. Schedule a plan review with me today and ensure your created plan will work exactly as you intend when your loved ones need it most.

Contact us today to get started.

This article is a service of August Law, a Personal Family Lawyer® Firm. We don’t just draft documents; we ensure you make informed and empowered decisions about life and death, for yourself and the people you love. That’s why we offer a Life & Legacy Planning™ Session, during which you will get more financially organized than you’ve ever been before and make all the best choices for the people you love. 

The content is sourced from Personal Family Lawyer® for use by Personal Family Lawyer® firms, a source believed to be providing accurate information. This material was created for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as ERISA, tax, legal, or investment advice. If you are seeking legal advice specific to your needs, such advice services must be obtained on your own separate from this educational material.

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6 Estate Planning Essentials for Newlyweds

We imagine that at this happiest time of your life, planning for your potential incapacity and eventual death is probably the farthest thing from your mind right now, but getting it handled as part of your wedding planning is the greatest gift you can give your new spouse.

With this in mind, here are six essential items you need to address in your plan.

1. Beneficiary Designations

One of the easiest—and often overlooked—estate planning tasks for newlyweds is updating your beneficiary designations. Some of your most valuable assets, such as life insurance policies, 401(k)s, and IRAs, do not transfer via a will or trust. Instead, they have beneficiary designations that allow you to name the person (or persons) you’d like to inherit the asset upon your death.

You should name your spouse as your primary beneficiary (if that’s your wish), and then name at least one contingent, or alternate, beneficiary in case your spouse dies before you. And if you have kids, do notname a minor child as a beneficiary of your life insurance or retirement accounts, even as a contingent beneficiary.

If a minor is listed as the beneficiary, the assets would be distributed to a court-appointed custodian, who will be in charge of managing the funds until the child reaches the age of majority, at which point all benefits are distributed to the beneficiary outright. 

If you want your child to inherit your life insurance or retirement account, you should set up a trust to receive those assets instead. And if you have significant retirement account assets, you may not even want those assets to go outright to your spouse (or future spouse), but instead, you may want to use a trust to distribute your retirement account assets.

2. Last Will & Testament

A last will and testament allows you to designate who should receive your assets upon your death. If you are newly married, you likely want your spouse to receive most, if not all, of your assets, and if so, you should name him or her as the primary beneficiary in your will.

Although your spouse would likely inherit mostof your assets should you die without a will, known as dying intestate, depending on state law and whether or not you have children, your assets may not get divided according to your wishes, so it’s always a good idea to create a will (or update your old one) when you get married. And to ensure that your will is created and executed properly, you should always work with trusted legal counsel like us, and never rely on generic, fill-in-the-blank documents you find online.

Although a will is an essential part of nearly every estate plan, as you’ll see below, having a will alone is rarely enough to ensure your spouse and other loved ones stay out of court and out of conflict when something happens to you.

3. Revocable Living Trust

Upon your death, assets included in a will must first pass through the court process known as probate before they can be transferred to your spouse or any other beneficiary. Probate can take months or even years to complete, and it can even sometimes lead to ugly conflicts between your spouse and other family members. Not to mention, your spouse will likely have to hire an attorney to represent him or her during probate, which can result in significant legal fees that can deplete your estate.

To avoid the time, cost, and conflict inherent to an estate plan consisting solely of a will, you should consider creating a revocable living trust, along with your will. If your assets are properly titled in the name of your living trust, they would pass directly to your spouse upon your incapacity or death, without the need for any court intervention. 

What’s more, in the terms of your trust, you can even outline the specific conditions that must be met for you to be deemed incapacitated, which would allow you to have some control over your life in the event you become incapacitated by illness or injury. This is in contrast to a will, which only goes into effect upon your death and then merely governs the distribution of your assets. 

Finally, if you are getting married and have minor children from a previous marriage, there is an inherent risk of conflict between your new spouse and your children because your children and new spouse have conflicting interests about what happens to your assets in the event of your death or incapacity.

4. Durable Financial Power of Attorney

If you become incapacitated and have not legally named someone to handle your financial and legal interests, your spouse would have to petition the court to be appointed as your guardian or conservator to handle your affairs. Though your spouse would typically be given priority, this is not always the case, and the court could choose someone else. And the person the court appoints could be a family member you would never want having control over your life, or it could even be a crooked professional guardian, who would charge exorbitant fees, keep you isolated from your family, and sell off your assets for their own benefit.  In any case, if you have not chosen someone to make your financial and legal decisions in the event of your incapacity, the court will choose for you.

To ensure your spouse has the ability to make these decisions, you should create a power of attorney documents to give him or her this legal authority. A durable financial power of attorney would grant your spouse the immediate authority to manage your financial, legal, and business affairs in the event of your incapacity.

With a durable financial power of attorney, your spouse would have a broad range of powers to handle things like paying your bills and taxes, running your business, collecting government benefits, and selling your home, as well as managing your banking and investment accounts. Granting durable financial power of attorney is especially important if you live together before you get married because, without it, the person named by the court could legally force your soon-to-be spouse out with little to no notice, leaving your beloved homeless.

5. Medical Power of Attorney and Living Will

A medical power of attorney is an advance healthcare directive that would give your spouse (or someone else) the immediate legal authority to make decisions about your healthcare and medical treatment should you become incapacitated and unable to make those decisions for yourself.

While a medical power of attorney allows your spouse to make healthcare decisions on your behalf during your incapacity, a living will is an advance directive that explains how you would want your medical care handled, particularly at the end of life. A medical power of attorney and a living will work closely together, and for this reason, they are sometimes combined into a single document.

Within the terms of your living will, you can spell out things, such as if and when you would want life support removed should you ever require it, whether you would want hydration and nutrition supplied, and even what kind of food you want and who can visit you in the hospital. 

6. Name Legal Guardians For Your Minor Children

If either you or your spouse has minor children from a prior relationship, or if you are planning to have kids of your own soon, it is imperative that you select and legally document long-term guardians for your children. Guardians are people legally named to care for your children in the event something should happen to you and your spouse. You must name guardians in a legal document, or you risk creating needless conflict and a long, expensive court process for your loved ones.

Working with us, naming legal guardians for your kids could not be any easier or more convenient. Creating the legal documents that will ensure your children will be raised to adulthood by the people you trust most and are never placed in the care of strangers (even temporarily) is one of our specialties. And we accomplish this using our comprehensive system called the Kids Protection Plan®.

The Kids Protection Plan® provides you with all of the legal planning tools needed to make sure there is never a question about who will take care of your kids if you and your spouse are in an accident or suffer some other life-threatening emergency. Even if you have already named guardians for your kids in your will, either on your own or with the help of a lawyer, we often find that these plans contain at least one of six common mistakes that can leave your kids at risk.

A Trusted Advisor For Your New Family

Marriage is an exciting first step for your new family, and you should start things off right by getting your estate plan properly prepared. Like your family, your planning needs are constantly evolving, so you must ensure your plan is regularly updated as your assets, family situation, and the laws change. If you do not keep your plan updated, it will be totally worthless when your family needs it. In fact, failing to regularly update your plan can create problems that leave your family worse off than if you had never created a plan at all. 

We have built-in systems and processes to ensure your plan is regularly reviewed and updated, so you do not need to worry about whether you have overlooked. What’s more, our planning services go far beyond simply creating documents and then never seeing you again. We will develop a relationship with you and your family. This is so we can get to know you, your wishes, and be there for you throughout the many stages of life—and above all, be there for your loved ones if and when you cannot be. Contact us today to get things started.

This article is a service of August Law, a Personal Family Lawyer® Firm. We don’t just draft documents; we ensure you make informed and empowered decisions about life and death, for yourself and the people you love. That’s why we offer a Family Wealth Planning Session™, during which you will get more financially organized than you’ve ever been before and make all the best choices for the people you love.
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Stephen “tWitch” Boss Dies Without a Will

Stephen Laurel Boss, also known as “tWitch,” was an American DJ, hip-hop dancer, choreographer, television producer, and actor whose personality lit up the stage on So You Think You Can Dance and who was  a producer and frequent guest host on The Ellen Degeneres Show. Boss also co-hosted the TV show Disney’s Fairy Tale Weddings alongside his wife and fellow dancer, Allison Holkers. 

Boss and Holkers shared a seemingly extremely happy life together in Los Angeles, California where they were raising their three children, ages 3, 7, and 14. Sadly, on December 13, 2022, Boss died by suicide at the age of 40. Boss’ death was a complete shock to fans and loved ones who reported the star seemed happy in the weeks leading up to his death.

Boss died without a Will or Trust in place, meaning his wife, Allison Holker, has the task of petitioning the California court system to release Boss’ share of their assets to her. While California has tools to simplify this process for some couples, Holker will still need to wait months before she can formally take possession of the property Boss owned with her, as well as property held in his name alone, including his share of his production company, royalties, and his personal investment account.

Unnecessary Court Involvement In a Time of Grief

In order to have access to her late husband’s assets, Holker had to make a public filing in the Los Angeles County Probate Court by filing a California Spousal Property Petition, which asks the court to transfer ownership of a deceased spouse’s property to the surviving spouse. Holker must also prove she was legally married to Boss at the time of his death.

While California’s Spousal Property Petition helps speed up an otherwise lengthy probate court process, the court’s involvement nonetheless delays Holker’s ability to access her late husband’s assets – a hurdle no one wants to deal with in the wake of a devastating loss. In addition, the court probate process is entirely public, meaning that the specific assets Holker is trying to access are made part of the public record and available for anyone to discover.

The process of proving your right to manage your loved one’s assets can feel like an unfair burden when there are so many other things to take care of during the death of a loved one.

This isn’t just a problem for the wealthy. Even if you own a modest estate at your death, your family will need to go through the probate court process to transfer ownership of your assets if you don’t have an estate plan in place.

How to Prevent This From Happening to Your Loved Ones

When someone dies without an estate plan in place, the probate court’s involvement can be a lengthy and public affair. At a minimum, you can expect the probate process to last at least 6 months and oftentimes as long as 18 months or more, depending on your state. Court involvement in Boss’ passing could have been completely avoided if Boss and Holker had created a revocable living trust to hold their family’s assets. If they had, Holker would have had immediate access to all of the couple’s assets upon Boss’ death, eliminating the need to petition a court or wait for its approval before accessing the funds that rightly belong to her.

A Trust would have also kept the family’s finances private. With a Trust, only the person in charge of managing the Trust assets (the Trustee) and the Trust’s direct beneficiaries need to know how the assets in a Trust are used. There is also no court-imposed timeline on the Trustee for taking care of your final matters (with the exception of some tax elections), so your family can move at the pace that’s right for them when the time comes to put your final affairs in order.

The privacy that a trust provides also helps to eliminate potential family conflict because only the parties directly involved in the Trust will know what the Trust says. If issues between family members arise over the contents of the Trust, the Trust will lay out all of your wishes in detail, so that all family members are on the same page and understand your wishes for the ones you’ve left behind.

Guidance for You and the Ones You Love

When you create a revocable living Trust at our firm, we ensure your loved ones have someone to turn to for guidance and support during times of uncertainty. No one expects the sudden loss of a loved one, but when it happens, your world is shaken. Even the simplest tasks can feel overwhelming, let alone the work involved to wrap up a loved one’s affairs.

That’s why we welcome you to meet with us to discuss your wishes for when you die or if you become incapacitated. If you’re ready to start the estate planning process, contact us today for a complimentary 15-minute discovery call.

This article is a service of August Law, a Personal Family Lawyer® Firm. We don’t just draft documents; we ensure you make informed and empowered decisions about life and death, for yourself and the people you love. That’s why we offer a Family Wealth Planning Session™, during which you will get more financially organized than you’ve ever been before and make all the best choices for the people you love.

The content is sourced from Personal Family Lawyer® for use by Personal Family Lawyer® firms, a source believed to be providing accurate information. This material was created for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as ERISA, tax, legal, or investment advice. If you are seeking legal advice specific to your needs, such advice services must be obtained on your own separate from this educational material.

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How Shopping Around for an Estate Plan Could Leave Your Family with an Expensive, Unintended Mess

Focused young couple calculating bills, discussing planning budget together, serious wife and husband looking at laptop screen, using online banking services and calculator, checking finances

Here is an illustrative story for you about a $3,000 plan that didn’t work by my mentor Alexis Neely, America’s Personal Family Lawyer®

When I was in law school, my father-in-law died. He had spent $3,000 to work with a law firm down in Florida to create estate planning documents that he was told would keep us out of Court and out of conflict with his ex-wife when he died or if he became incapacitated.

He got a nice thick set of documents, a fancy binder, and peace of mind. He put the binder on his shelf, never looked at it again and never heard from his lawyer again. He died thinking it was all handled.

You can imagine our surprise then when after his death, we were stuck dealing with the probate court and his ex-wife; the exact things my father-in-law had spent good money to protect us from having to deal with.

It turns out that his fancy set of documents had never been updated, so they were out of date. And his assets weren’t even titled in the name of his estate plan. I thought for sure, this must have been malpractice. But after going to work at one of the best law firms in the Country, and then surveying hundreds of other lawyers just to confirm, I found out that this was not malpractice at all. This was common practice.

Lawyers everywhere were putting in place form documents that they know won’t work when their clients’ families need them, not because they are bad people or bad lawyers, but because that’s how they were trained. Form documents, no updating of the documents or regular communication with the clients once the plan was done, no inventory of the assets to ensure that all assets could be found after the death or incapacity of a loved one, not ensuring that assets were titled properly to make sure the plan even worked.

On top of that, I later discovered that the plans lawyers were putting in place for families with minor kids at home had huge roles that left the kids at risk of being taken out of the home and into protective custody while the Will and named guardians were located. This all happened at the best law firm in the Country, at which I worked for three years after law school.

When I left to start my own law firm, I made a commitment to create something truly meaningful for my clients; plans that would actually work when their families needed it and provide not only true peace of mind, but a process that would support my clients to not just plan for death, but to become better parents, better business owners, and better community citizens during life, as well.

Now Personal Family Lawyer® members across the globe are being trained the right way to plan for families and be there for your loved ones when you can’t be.

Here are 5 reasons why shopping for the cheapest estate plan is likely to leave you with a plan that won’t work for your family… and will leave them with a big mess instead.

1. The least expensive plan isn’t worth the paper it’s written on once you’ve left the attorney’s office. Your life changes, the law changes, and your assets change over time; and your plan needs to keep up with those changes. The truth of the matter is a lawyer can’t afford to provide anything more than documents that won’t get updated when you only pay a few hundred dollars for a plan. The business model simply doesn’t work.

2. Cheap estate plans are often sold by financial professionals. They often want to get their hands on your money, not do right by your family. An attorney who has built a practice to actually serve your family in their best interests cannot make a living selling $399 plans; only insurance and financial professionals getting paid commissions to sell your families annuities and life insurance products they don’t need can make a living selling cheap documents. Buyer beware!

3. Forms and documents won’t be there for your family when you can’t be. You want to leave your loved ones a relationship with a trusted advisor with whom you have built a relationship during your lifetime, who has met your family, and who they already trust.

4. You get what you pay for and it’s your family that pays the price. As you read in the story in the above story, my colleague’s father-in-law died after paying $3,000 for an estate plan (not cheap) so that his family wouldn’t have to deal with the probate court or his ex-wife after his death, and yet that’s exactly what happened when he died; his family was in court and dealing with his ex-wife. Why? Because the law firm was a traditional forms-and- documents firm that put in place plans but didn’t make sure assets were owned in the right way or that the plan stayed up to date over time. You might think that’s malpractice, but it’s not. It’s common practice and it leaves your family at risk if and when something happens to you!

5. An estate plan isn’t a “set it and forget it” kind of thing. It needs to stay up to date with changes in your life, the law and your assets. There’s currently more than $1 billion in unclaimed property held by the state of Tennessee. Yep, that billion with a B. It typically gets there when someone dies or becomes incapacitated, and their family loses track of it because it wasn’t tracked well during life. And that’s just one way your family loses out if you’ve shopped around for the cheapest estate plan rather than getting in place a plan that actually works for the people you love.

If what you want is the false security of a cheap estate plan, go online and do it yourself. Chances are, you haven’t done that because you know that’s risky business and you love your family too much for that.

It’s the same way when you are shopping around town for the cheapest plan possible. Because you love your family, you don’t actually want the cheap plan; you want the plan that’s going to work for the people you love, when they need it.

If you already have an estate plan in place and you are concerned you may have gotten a cheap plan that won’t actually serve your family when they need it most, contact us for a plan review.

We begin our planning process with a Family Wealth Planning Session, during which you’ll become more financially organized than you ever have been before and you’ll finally be in a place to make informed, educated choices about the right plan for your family based on the things that really matter, instead of just shopping around by price.

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The August Law PLLC team will work hard to deliver good quality information upon subscription. However, if you decide that you no longer want to receive emails from us, feel free to click the "unsubscribe" button at the bottom of the email received.