Living Trust
A legal arrangement you create during your lifetime to hold your assets, so they can pass to your beneficiaries without going through probate.
With a typical revocable living trust you are usually the trustee while you are alive and well, so day-to-day nothing changes: you still control everything. What changes is what happens when you die or become unable to manage things, because a successor trustee you named steps in without a court appointing anyone.
The step people miss is funding. A trust only controls what has actually been retitled into it. A signed trust document with nothing moved into it is paperwork that does very little, and it is the single most common way a paid-for plan quietly fails.
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Related Terms
Revocable Trust
A trust you can change, amend, or cancel at any time while you are alive and competent.
Irrevocable Trust
A trust that generally cannot be changed or revoked once established, because you have given up control of the assets placed in it.
Trustee
The person or institution responsible for managing a trust and following its instructions for the benefit of the beneficiaries.
Probate
The court process that validates a will, settles debts, and transfers what someone owned in their own name after they die.
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