1:24
Adding an adult child to a property title costs you the step-up in basis and exposes the home to marital claims if they divorce. Realtors should warn clients about these two mistakes before it's too late.
Adding an adult child to a property title costs you the step-up in basis and exposes the home to marital claims if they divorce. Realtors should warn clients about these two mistakes before it's too late.
The biggest mistake I see people make all the time is they add their kid to the title of their house, like they add their adult child to title. And that creates a lot of problems, mostly in a step up in basis because the transfer happens when they add their child. So if the parent doesn't pass away for another 20 years, then when the child actually inherits that house, they're already on title, so they're ruining their stuff up in basis. The other problem that happens with that, particularly in California, is, is that once you put the family home into a child's name or jointly, well, if they then get divorced, that is now part of their marital assets. And so you could lose the family home over the kids divorce. Right. So that's. Those are the most frequent problems and that's what I would love for realtors in the nation to be in conversation with their clients about. But the way that that manifests is those are the searches. Those are the searches that people are searching is like, they're like, how do I protect mom's house? Or. Or now with ChatGPT or the AEO, they're having a whole conversation with ChatGPT to say, I'm going through a divorce and I'm on the title of my mom's house and what am I going to do? How can I protect this? You know? And like, those are the searches that are coming. There's a lot more to that.
