A Pour-Over Will Can Fill The Cracks
When you are planning your estate you have to determine how you will be transferring your assets to your loved ones, and many people choose to do so through the creation of a trust. There are a number of reasons why a trust is preferable to a last will for many people, and one of the most common ones is to avoid probate.
Why do people want to avoid probate? Probate is time-consuming, and your heirs will not receive their inheritances until the process of probate has run its course. In addition, when your estate goes through probate you are opening the door and inviting disgruntled parties to contest your will before the probate court.
Plus, the process of probate can be quite expensive. The court itself charges a fee, and the executor is entitled to remuneration for his or her time as well. There are also probate attorney fees, and the executor may have to bring in an accountant, an appraiser or appraisers, and estate liquidators, all of whom charge for their services. These expenses can sometimes reach or exceed 5% of the overall value of your estate.
So trusts hold a great deal of appeal to many individuals as a means for avoiding probate. But if you do use a trust as your primary vehicle of transfer you probably would also want to include a pour-over will as part of your estate plan. What the pour-over will does is state your desire to place any assets that you have left over after you pass away into the trust for distribution according to your wishes as elucidated in the trust agreement.
You may acquire property along the way and never get around to placing it into the trust, and there are also some pragmatic reasons why people who have a trust in place choose not to put certain property into it while they’re still alive. If you include a pour-over will all of your property will ultimately become a part of the trust and nothing can slip through the cracks.
But, it is certainly better to fully fund your trust rather than relying on the Pour-over will, since the Pour-over will will require probate, which is likely one of the main reasons that you executed a trust to begin with. I would compare it to a good parachute. In an emergency, you would rather have one than not, but the best approach would simply be a safe landing.
