Estate Planning - Rules and Trustees

Copyright 2006 Ronald Hudkins

If you are wisely attempting to put some assets into a trust (inter vivos) in your lifetime, then you have been paying attention to the important differences between wills and trusts. A trust created during your life will be far more secure with respect to its ability to withstand challenges to how your assets are to be distributed during estate planning than a will. Making a trust is a brave thing to do, because it telegraphs, to a certain extent, what you are going to do with your assets while you are still alive. This is what insulates it from attacks on your capacity, because it is unlikely, for example that, one of your relations is going to say you are insane or feeble and unduly influenced by another of your relatives to your face and this makes the trust a far surer bet than a will, in some cases.

However, the trust also may engender hard feels regarding the exclusion of a relative and those feelings will become known to a person creating a trust while they are still alive. This is the advantage of a will -- if people don