Standard Living Trust Forms

Advantages of Standard Form Living Trusts
Drawbacks of Standard Form Living Trusts

However, if you research various guide books and of course, the internet, you will find a large variety of so called “standard living trust forms”. Several authors have published standard forms for living trusts that are easy to understand and clearly written. Often those forms distinguish different base models of living trusts, that reflect different personal situations.
   
Advantages of Standard Form Living Trusts

Using a standard form is a great way to draft your very own living trust. If you like the paperwork and intensive thinking, that is involved in creating a living trust, such living trust forms provide a perfect starting point to draft you very own trust document. Self-creating a trust might especially be preferable, because you will really understand the implications of your trust, if you have set it up all by yourself. You will also be able to amend your trust document to match future changes of your needs.

Drawbacks of Standard Form Living Trusts

Nevertheless, relying on forms for drafting your own living trust has some major drawbacks. Being a San Francisco trust attorney I still remember the making of my very first trust document for a client. Surely, having a law school degree helps a lot when you try to incorporate every single bit of your client’s wishes into a deed of trust. Yet for me – even though I was already used to the special legal terminology – it’s been a very hard task to accomplish. Therefore I can fully understand people, who do not want to draft a living trust all by themselves. Although standard trust forms are easily available to everyone, self-creating a living trust is still a challenging project, that is time consuming and it needs a lot of reading before you can actually start.
 
In addition no guidebook can cover every particularity, that might occur in the process of drafting a deed of trust. There might be a specific tax issue or a certain kind of property that requires special attention; every case is different. Therefore a self-created living trust document often bears the risk of overseeing important issues. Your local trust law firm – e.g. Rinne Legal in San Francisco, Oakland, Fairfield, Walnut Creek and Sacramento – is able to ensure that your estate planning is complete and nothing is forgotten.

In the next chapter an basic structural outline of an ordinary living trust is given. There are standard issues that have to be addressed as soon as you’re married or involved in a permanent relationship. Therefore I start with describing the basic components of a living trust first; subsequently I extent the subject to the special needs of couples.
I am not going to provide an easy-to-copy sample form for a living trust. There are plenty of good sample forms already available. Instead I’m going help you to understand the structure of living trusts through an outline of the basic components of the deed of trust.