Estate-planning attorney Mark Kohler explains that a living trust only works when fully funded. He walks through a complete asset audit: list every asset in a spreadsheet, note how each is titled, then connect the trust to each one as owner, member, shareholder, or beneficiary. Without this step, your trust won't actually protect or transfer your assets.
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Your living trust is so powerful, but we've also got to keep it funded so we can let it do its job. So I want to challenge you to do an asset audit, certainly if you're setting up a new trust, but for those of you that already have one, and that entails listing out everything you own. Just do a spreadsheet. You can handwrite it, put it in Excel and list all the assets you own and how they're titled, registered, or who the beneficiary is. And don't just guess. You got to go look it up. Get online and log in into your retirement account, log into your life insurance company, pull the title to your vehicles, pull the title on your rental properties, your house, start tracking down the keys and email accounts and passwords for your cryptocurrency. Look at your investment accounts where you might be holding stock or mutual funds or ETFs. Get this spreadsheet out and look at all of these different categories of ownership. And then at the end of the day, we're going to make sure your trust is connected to all of them. As the owner, the member, the shareholder, the beneficiary, whatever the case may be. So now your trust can do its job.
