Is Creating or Updating a Living Trust a New Year’s Resolution?

Admit it: We all make resolutions

Whether we admit it or not, we all make New Year’s resolutions. We may not call them resolutions, and we may keep them to ourselves, but we all make at least small promises to ourselves. Who doesn’t at least silently promise to lose ten pounds or to stop smoking? Or commit to healthier living, getting more exercise, having better relationships or spending more time with their family in the new year?

At California Document Preparers, we’ve learned that another resolution people make is to create a Living Trust. It’s often the result of having spent time with family over the holidays—adult children talk to  their parents about the importance of getting not just a Living Trust, but a Power of Attorney and Advance Healthcare Directive. It’s easy to find reasons to procrastinate—it takes time, costs money, and who wants to deal with financial statements and legal forms? But we’ve thousands of Living Trusts over the years; it’s a very straightforward process, and we take pride in making this easy for our clients.

A dedicated team to help you

Living Trusts are one of our most important services. While anyone in our three offices can help you, we have dedicated team members who work specifically with Living Trust clients, and they develop close working relationships with their clients throughout the process. They’re knowledgeable, accommodating and work hard to make sure that every client understands the process. They’re available by phone and email to answer questions.

The Living Trust process at California Document Preparers:

Most of our clients tell us that creating their Trust was a lot easier than they thought it would be. We use special attorney-approved workbooks that provide a straightforward step-by-step process:

1. Come in to one of our offices and fill out the workbook.
2. We prepare all of the legal documents for you.
3. If you have property that needs to be moved into the Trust, we prepare the transfer deed(s) for you.
4. When your Trust is ready—generally within a week, you come in and we review the documents with you. Once you’re satisfied that everything is correct, you sign the documents and we notarize them.
5. We give you a hard copy of your Living Trust and retain a soft copy/pdf file. We can email this to you if you like; many people want to be able to distribute this to their children or other family members.
6. Your Trust should be updated for important life events, so we make it easy to do this for you as well, from a simple amendment to an entire restatement.

The best part: One flat fee. We don’t charge extra for phone calls, notarizing documents or if you require more help. This is our commitment to our clients. No surprises.

Taking the time to prepare a Living Trust is truly one of the most thoughtful things you can do for your loved ones. When you die, your family will be dealing with grief and loss. Without a Living Trust, they also will be dealing with what can be the nearly overwhelming burden of Probate.

A Comprehensive Living Trust package

We welcome your questions. Contact us at one of our three Bay Area California Document Preparers offices. We help you through every step of this process.