Trusts are often more suitable for personal asset protection and estate planning, while LLCs are generally better for actively conducting business and providing personal liability protection for business activities.
Trust ownership refers to the legal concept of holding property or assets in a trust, where the trustee manages the property for the benefit of the beneficiaries. This means that the trustee has legal ownership of the property, but is obligated to act in the best interests of the beneficiaries.
Three trusts that single people may want to consider include a revocable living trust, an asset protection trust, or a testamentary trust.
Establishing and maintaining a trust can be complex and expensive. Trusts require legal expertise to draft, and ongoing management by a trustee may involve administrative fees. Additionally, some trusts require regular tax filings, adding to the overall cost.
Trusts offer amazing benefits, but they also come with potential downsides like loss of control, limited access to assets, costs, and recordkeeping difficulties.
Rich people frequently place their homes and other financial assets in trusts to reduce taxes and give their wealth to their beneficiaries. They may also do this to protect their property from divorce proceedings and frivolous lawsuits.
A Living Trust can help avoid or reduce estate taxes, gift taxes and income taxes, too.
Selecting the wrong trustee is easily the biggest blunder parents can make when setting up a trust fund. As estate planning attorneys, we've seen first-hand how this critical error undermines so many parents' good intentions.
If you're single, the two most important reasons for establishing a living trust is that it helps your beneficiaries to avoid the costs and hassles of probate and will keep your assets out of court-supervised guardianship.
The two most effective alternatives are (i) to title assets as “Joint Tenants with Rights of Survivorship” and (ii) designating beneficiaries on financial accounts. In many cases, particularly between spouses, an entire estate can be transferred to the other just by utilizing these two methods.
There are many additional benefits to setting up a trust, for instance, creditor protection in some cases, to protect premarital assets from divorcing spouses or in the case of death of an owner, to hold life insurance policies, to manage assets not easily divisible and provide liquidity for a business or estate to ...
One question that often arises when we recommend a Trust is whether you can transfer your home into a Trust if you still have a mortgage. The short answer to the question is: Yes, you can place your house in a Trust even if a bank holds a mortgage for it.
“In my opinion, LLCs are your best option for owning real property, as they blend the best aspects of partnerships and corporations. With an LLC, you don't own the property, the company owns it, protecting you from much liability.”
A revocable living trust is an arrangement set up through a legal document. The document gives someone the power to make decisions about another person's money or property that's held in the trust.
For example, Gargiulo and Ertug (2006) identify what they call the 'dark side' of trust as occurring when the trustor strays beyond a critical threshold of confidence such that her trust in another becomes inappropriate and ill-judged.
There is no minimum
You can create a trust with any amount of assets, as long as they have some value and can be transferred to the trust. However, just because you can doesn't necessarily mean you should. Trusts can be complicated.
There are a variety of assets that you cannot or should not place in a living trust. These include: Retirement accounts. Accounts such as a 401(k), IRA, 403(b) and certain qualified annuities should not be transferred into your living trust.
The trust fund loophole refers to the “stepped-up basis rule” in U.S. tax law. The rule is a tax exemption that lets you use a trust to transfer appreciated assets to the trust's beneficiaries without paying the capital gains tax. Your “basis” in an asset is the price you paid for the asset.
Another key difference: While there is no federal inheritance tax, there is a federal estate tax. The federal estate tax generally applies to assets over $13.61 million in 2024 and $13.99 million in 2025, and the federal estate tax rate ranges from 18% to 40%.
The trust remains revocable while you are alive; you are free to cancel it, replace it, or make changes as you see fit. Once you die, your living trust becomes irrevocable, which means that your wishes are now set in stone.
Parents and other family members who want to pass on assets during their lifetimes may be tempted to gift the assets. Although setting up an irrevocable trust lacks the simplicity of giving a gift, it may be a better way to preserve assets for the future.
Once your home is in the trust, it's no longer considered part of your personal assets, thereby protecting it from being used to pay for nursing home care. However, this must be done in compliance with Medicaid's look-back period, typically 5 years before applying for Medicaid benefits.
It can be advantageous to put most or all of your bank accounts into your trust, especially if you want to streamline estate administration, maintain privacy, and ensure assets are distributed according to your wishes.