Amend A Living Trust To Add A Beneficiary: Fill & Download for Free

Can an estate be a beneficiary of a will?I presume you mean the estate of a deceased person.Such estate presumes the person is deceased. Generally, one cannot leave a legacy to a person who is dead, though most likely it would pass to the deceased person’s descendants, most likely pursuant to the jurisdiction’s antilapse statute.[1][1][1][1] Absent antilapse statute the legacy would pass pursuant to the jurisdiction’s intestacy statute.Now, if descendent had created a trust that has not terminated, the legacy could pass to the trust. But whether it can may depend whether the trustee is empowered to add to the trust’s corpus.Estate planning attorneys would surely advise their clients to ensure all proposed legatees are alive and living before preparing their wills or revocable trusts. Also ensure their clients set up contingent distributions in case any proposed legatees predecease them. At the same time clients should discuss with their estate planning attorneys whether they might need to make codicils to their wills or amend their revocable trusts to account for legatees who predecease them.While Quora legal discussions can be interesting and sometimes informative and entertaining, in no way should their content be taken or construed as legal advice. Only an attorney at law person has retained and with whom s/he has established an attorney-client relationship and who has been apprised of all facts in a matter is qualified to render legal advice for any situation.Footnotes[1] Anti-Lapse Statute[1] Anti-Lapse Statute[1] Anti-Lapse Statute[1] Anti-Lapse Statute

Your will is directions for the disposition of property after your death. It simply tells the probate court (or whatever it is called in your jurisdiction) what you want done with your assets.A trust is a contract between you (the “grantor” or “settlor”) and someone else (the “trustee,” which may be a bank, an individual, several individuals, etc., subject to the laws of the jurisdiction), in which the trustee agrees to hold and manage property for the benefit of someone else (the “beneficiary”). So you can make much more complex arrangements with a trust. Your will can direct that property be given to your child, but a trust agreement can provide that the property will be held by someone else for the child’s benefit, can provide how the property should be managed, how much money the child gets and how often or for what purposes, who decides how the property is invested, etc.A trust can be established during the grantor’s lifetime, in which case it is a “living” or “inter vivos” trust. Or it can be created under a will, in which case it is a “testamentary” trust. Testamentary trusts are infrequently used, since they are more difficult to amend, involve ongoing probate court supervision (in some jurisdictions), and are less useful than living trusts because they can’t be used for any purpose during lifetime (wills have no significance until the testator is dead). A living trust doesn’t have to funded until the grantor dies, but most people find it useful to add assets to them while alive so that those assets are not governed by the will, and so are not subject to probate. When a trust is funded during the grantor’s lifetime, the grantor generally is the trustee (so long as he remains competent) and the beneficiary (so long as he lives), so there is no loss of control. Of course, there is no tax impact from such a trust; the tax code simply ignores it so long as the grantor has complete control of the assets for his own benefit. However, having assets in a living trust while alive is convenient in case of incompetence, since the trust document should provide for the automatic succession of a new trustee if the grantor can no longer manage his financial affairs.Note that a trust will not make a will unnecessary. Any property owned the grantor at his death (that is, not held by him as trustee, but owned by him in his individual capacity) has to be given to the trustee by a bequest in the will. It is possible for a person to successfully get every asset he owns into a living trust before he dies, so there is nothing at all to pass under the will, but it is very hard to assure that result. For example, if, after the grantor’s death, he (his estate, actually) receives an income tax refund from a prior tax year, that refund will be a probate asset and will not get to the trust unless there is a will that gives such property to the trustee.There are also some things that need to be done by a will, even if the assets are all in trust before death, such as nominating guardians of minor children.Some trusts established during lifetime are irrevocable, but that is not what is generally meant when people refer to living trusts. Irrevocable trusts are used for specialized purposes, beyond the scope of this answer.This answer is not legal advice; it is simply an explanation of some common legal concepts. Estate planning is complicated for persons with substantial assets or difficult assets to manage (privately held business interests, valuable collections or art, interests in other person’s trusts, etc.) and every case is different. There are far too many people with complex situations getting overly simple estate plans, and even more people with simple or modest assets being sold overly complex estate plans. A skilled and ethical lawyer is absolutely necessary.

It is not a question the SS-OASI trust fund will be exhausted, but when, Between 1957 and 1965, SS-OASI spent more on benefits than it collected in payroll tax revenue (six years), between 1971 and 1983 every single year SS-OASI spent more on benefits than it collected in payroll taxes and at that point inorder to pay scheduled benefits borrowed $11 Billion from the SS-DI and Medicare trust funds (was paid back over the next several years as the increase in tax, base, tax on benefits increased revenues).I seriously question the 2035 year. In 1983, the SSA projected 2060, then it went to 2041, 2029, 2032, 2033 and now it is 2035. All the SSA does is change the assumptions to add more years or to buy time. My computer model in 1984 showed the year to be 2037–2038 and held steady until 2008. Since 2010, every penny of payroll tax paid into SS-OASI has been spent on current benefits plus funds from the trust fund. In essence, no ones payroll tax since 2010 has been set aside in trust to pay their future benefits.I believe a more realistic year to be 2028.I have known for 40 years the trust fund would be exhausted at some point. I do not believe congress will be able to cry wolf again and plead with workers to accept another larger tax increase than the boomers did in 1983. I also do not believe increasing the retirement age would be prudent and it would be far from fair to millennials’.Social Security has never been fair (the first 37 cohorts did not pay sufficient payroll taxes to fund their own benefits based on the 1935 SS Act and the 1939 Amendment as well as 1952, 1954 and 1958 increased benefits greatly making the program more insolvent than it was from the beginning.In 1935 there was no unfunded liability, no beneficiaries and no workers covered by SS-OASI. Today we have 55 million beneficiaries, 170 million workers who have worked ten years and qualify for benefits, $2.8 Trillion in US Treasury Notes and an unfunded liability at greater than $40 Trillion. Is SS-OASI more solvent than it was in 1935? Is SS-OASI better off than it was in 1935?What I would do is exactly what I have been doing since 1973, saving my own funds and educating others about SS-OASI and how much of your income to save to live comfortably without SS-OASI. However, if payroll taxes go to 18% by 2060, then it will be virtually impossible for anyone to save since SS-OASI would consume 98% of all discretionary spending/savings. In essence those people would beholding to a politician.This is not new, but really old news. I read about it in news papers in the 60’s, saw it reported on the evening news, SSA statements sent to all in 1995–2009 also identified the insolvency of the trust fund on the front page, lower right paragraph.We need to vote out every politician in congress and the president who was in the Senate: 1973-2009. He is one of the 2,420 representatives who created the SS-OASI mess since 1967. Then there are thousands more since 1935.