Hi, my name is Mike Greiner, and I’m an attorney here at the Financial Law Group located in Warren, Michigan. Our website is www.financiallawgroup.com, and our phone number is (586) 693-2000. I’m here to talk to you today about the difference between a will and a trust, in terms of estate planning.

Generally what I suggest to people is that they should do a trust. It’s what I did for my family at the request of my wife and it’s what I suggest for most people where you have any assets you want to have addressed. I’ll tell you why. Most people want to do estate planning for one reason and that is they want to avoid the probate court. Wills do not avoid the Probate Court. A Will is essentially a letter to the Probate Court saying this is how I want my assets to be addressed.

It’s better than nothing but it still means that your estate goes through the probate court. With a trust however you’ve created a separate document, a separate entity that essentially owns your assets until after you’ve pasted and what that means is that you don’t need to go to the probate court at all. It completely avoid probate. There are other advantages as well to trusts. If your a parent of minor children as I am then you can imagine, even if you’re not a particularly wealthy person. You may have life insurance, for example, which could be very substantial, even a couple hundred thousand dollars. Which isn’t a whole lot in terms of life insurance. Would be a hell of a party for an 18 year old who suddenly came into that kind of money. 1 thing you can do with a trust that you cannot do with a will is you can create a situation whereby there’s something called a testamentary trust, where the trust continues past the time that your child reaches their maturity. So for example your able to put in a provision that says, that you want the trust to continue. And your child only gets x percent of the total estate, or x dollars on their eighteenth birthday. Or even later, and then that remaining funds get spent on their education, on health care costs, on housing and health and welfare costs.

This continues on until they reach a certain age at which they can distribute the assets, even into their 30s. You can have a certain amount per year given to the child. You can have set aside even things like money for a wedding and that type of thing. It gives you total control even going into the future so that your child just doesn’t come into a whole bunch of money when they turn 18. And unfortunately, with the will, you don’t have any kind of control like that. So I find that trusts can be very valuable. They do cost a little bit more on the front end because they’re more work but.

But ultimately, I find that they really provide a lot of satisfaction to people going forward. Again, my name is Mike Greiner with Financial Law Group here in Warren, Michigan in Macomb County. Our number is (586) 693-2000. And our website is financiallawgroup.com.