Estate Planning is a general term for the legal process of helping our clients arrange their affairs in such a manner as to ensure that, in the event of injury, illness, incapacity or death, their finances and personal care will be handled in the way they have directed in advance and by those individuals or financial institutions which they wish to entrust with these important tasks.
Generally, the revocable living trust is usually the centerpiece of an estate plan. A common misconception is that trusts are only for the wealthy and are established for the sole purpose of minimizing estate taxes. Consult with our Salt Lake City attorney at the Law Offices of Ryan E. Simpson, P.C., to find out about the benefits of a trust:
- Simplify administration and distribution of a person’s assets upon death.
- Minimize the cost of administration by avoiding the costs of the court proceedings called probate.
- Clearly designate persons or financial institutions to handle a person’s financial and medical affairs upon incapacity or death.
- Tax saving features
Although many other important benefits come from establishing living trusts (a living trust being simply a trust that is established while a person is alive as opposed to a trust that is created at a person’s death, the latter kind of trust being called a testamentary trust) these are the most important features that most of our clients are looking for when setting up their estate plans.