Quote Originally Posted by iris lilies View Post

Why don’t you like trusts? We have a trust, DH and I. The idea is that it avoids probate. and the estate’s assets can be dispensed of more quickly without dragging it through public courts.

My in-laws had a trust and that seemed to work just fine. The current farm problem, as I see it has nothing to do with how the assets were structured.
I'm glad your trust works for you. I get why people do them, and I have also seen where they can lead to unnecessary problems and complications. My personal experience recently was very negative.

I know people do them to avoid probate, but in my experience, probate was better than what was going on with the trust. And if the trust is bad enough, you can end up in probate court anyway to litigate the trust.

But the lawyers are always making money on the trusts, that's for sure. And if you had a really big or complicated estate or a sick or disabled child or adult, then great. Unless you had unscrupulous lawyers or guardians or conservators. I did a lot of reading of probate files that featured my mother's professional guardian--and boy, trusts were not protecting anyone. And these were cases with incapacitated adults who actually needed protection.

IN my state, my aunt's state,and my sil's state, nothing was dragged into the public courts-- all the documents about what they actually had, all numbers, were private and inaccessible to the public.

I looked on reddit to see other people's experiences and the first thing I found was in a lawyer forum, by lawyers, and a lot of what I saw was in there:

Trust happy attorneys make me want to punch someone. : r/Lawyertalk

ETA: Probate provides oversight by the courts. Sometimes, you really, really want the protections provided under the law. As someone said on the thread above, clients would be better off in probate than in these badly written trusts.

Finally, if you put beneficiaries on all your accounts, those monies go directly to your beneficiaries, and those assets are outside of probate. That's how we've set things up. That is faster than dealing with the trust would be, and the lawyers are not charging 300-400 dollars an hour to give people what is rightfully theirs.