General Deed Of Gift To Revocable Living Trust: Fill & Download for Free

Have you ever asked your parents about your inheritance or attempted to find their Will to see how much they left you?It's apt that you phrase your question using “parents” in the plural. Disregarding how many parents of adult children have divorced (and sometimes remarried and had more children), many retirement-age, married couples with adult children have extremely limited estate plans whilst both remain alive.To back up, probate — the legal process through which the estate of the deceased is administered and distributed to beneficiaries, creditors and the public via taxes — varies significantly from state to state in the U.S.; each state has its own probate code and judiciary system for applying the code and retains sole authority over estate and inheritance issues.Louisiana is the most unusual since it inherited and maintained a civil law tradition from Spain and France that works very differently in important respects, like intestate deaths — when someone dies without a will — and offers less options to grantors interested in living and other types of revocable and irrevocable trusts, compared to the other states, which all adhere pretty closely to English common/chancery law.I'm not sure of the breakdown, but quite a few, if not the majority, of states are what the law refers to as “community property” jurisdictions. In these states, when the first spouse dies, with or without a will, very little happens in terms of inheritance for parties like children because the overwhelming majority of the property and assets owned by the deceased are simply transferred to the surviving spouse, often without tax implications or public transparency, as tenancies in common or community property.So, if both of your parents are still alive, it's likely that they’ve done very little in regards estate planning yet. Perhaps they've each accounted for some specific gifts or transfers to charities or children to be triggered if they are the first to pass, but generally in these community property jurisdictions— even when the first spouse dies intestate (without a will) — all of their property gets passed on to the surviving spouse.So the big transfers from generation to generation tend to happen when the second spouse dies, and that person generally starts to get more serious about estate planning when the first spouse dies.A few notes: there is a difference between being familiar with the provisions of an estate plan and being aware of the value of those provisions. Wills often include very draft schedules of assets as they existed when the will was last updated, but they're much more focused on the manner in which the estate is to be distributed and to whom than they are about the dollars and cents of the estate’s value. A parent can and should share as much information as they are comfortable sharing about the means by which the probate will take place — it’s especially imperative that they do this with whomever they've designated to serve as executor or trustee — but this needn't include details about who gets how much.Once they've died, the executor has until the end of the tax year to assemble all of the statements, deeds, notes, liabilities and other paperwork required to submit to the IRS and the court so that the assets and liabilities can be accounted: whatever remains after the liabilities are paid is essentially the “estate” which will be distributed per the terms of the will, trust or both, to the heirs.It's very unusual for children to be treated differently when it comes to inheritance. This is because even if the grantor would like to leave more to one child and stick it to the other child, the child designated to receive less could and likely would challenge the will in court. Even if the challenge is unsuccessful, the disgruntled child could prolong probate, drive the executor or trustee bananas and gum everything up to the extent that parents tend to leave approximately equal shares to their children specifically to avoid this contentiousness.I'm a big advocate of transparency on these issues. If they exist, older parents should inform their adult children where their important papers are located and provide them with relevant contact information for attorneys and financial folks like accountants and bankers. Death is absolutely not a good time to start guessing where these things were kept and what they say.Sorry this wasn't as quick a response as I infer you were seeking.