This article is intended for educational purposes only and is not legal advice. For guidance on your personal situation, please contact a lawyer. If you have a family, you may be inclined to take certain steps to protect them financially.
One of those might be buying life insurance. Another might involve coming up with a plan to pass your assets on to your heirs as smoothly as possible. To that end, you may want to consider using a living trust instead of simply writing a will.
Here are a few reasons why a living trust might be a great solution for you. 1. You want to maintain control of your assets while you're still alive Moving assets into a living trust allows you to pass them on to your loved ones seamlessly.
The trust becomes the owner of the assets you place in it, but you as the grantor have control of it, so you're also allowed to change your mind along the way about how those assets are managed, and who the beneficiaries should be, among other things. The beauty of a living trust is that you maintain control of your assets and the trust itself while you're still alive, so you're not locked into the decisions you make at any specific point in time. 2.
You want to spare your loved ones from going through probate When you use a will to pass along your assets, your heirs are put through a notoriously painful process called probate, which is a court system's way of proving that will's validity. That could result in it taking longer for your heirs to inherit the assets yo.
