Everything You Need To Know About Family Trusts

Setting up a family trust can have a lot of different benefits and people decide to do it for a wide range of reasons. It’s a great way to protect your family’s assets and ensure that your children are going to be financially stable in the future. If you’re worrying about the financial security of your family, this should help you decide whether a trust is the right option for you. 

What Is A Trust?

Setting up a trust means that you essentially transfer ownership of your assets to somebody else, they are known as the trustee. As long as it is written into the agreement, you will still be able to use the assets as if you still owned them. Only the beneficiaries of the trust have this control over the assets and can only use them in the ways that have been written into the trust agreement. This agreement is known as a trust deed and needs to be drawn up by a legal professional. If you want to add more assets to the trust at a later date the trust can buy them. For legal reasons, the family needs to lend the money to the trust so they can then pay it back to the family in exchange for whatever assets you want to add to the trust. This is only a paper transaction and no money actually needs to change hands. 

Seek advice from legal companies like Butterfly Financial Solutions who can help you with the legal aspects of setting up a trust. It is likely that you’ll have to pay a fair amount of fees to set it up and there will also be ongoing charges to pay so make sure that you shop around for the best deal otherwise you might negate any of the benefits that you get from setting it up in the first place. 

So, that’s what a trust is and how you set it up, but why should you do it in the first place?

Estate Taxes 

One of the primary reasons that people decide to set up family trusts is to help reduce the tax burden on their estate. If you officially own your estate, you will be eligible to pay certain taxes on it. However, the wording in those laws is quite specific so if the estate is technically owned by a family trust and not you personally, you are exempt from some of those taxes. Certain ones are still applicable even in a trust so you can’t remove the tax burden completely but you can make it a lot lower. 

Protecting Money

Another reason that you might want to set up a family trust is to protect your money. If you are starting a business, there is always a chance that it could go under and your assets may be seized to pay off debts. To ensure that you aren’t left with nothing, you can put your house and some of your money into a trust so if the worst does happen, they won’t be considered as part of your estate and won’t be taken by the bank if you owe money.