In this Elder Law Minute, Wes Coulson discusses the difference between a trust amendment and an “amendment and restatement.”
Transcript:
Hi! I’m Wes Coulson from Dent-Coulson Elder Law, proudly serving clients throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area and beyond. I’d like to welcome you to our Elder Law and Estate Planning Minute. We do these to help educate people, give them some little tips, and especially to let them know the questions they need to ask, things that they’ve maybe not thought of. Our thought on that is that we can help you best if you realize the things that you need help and that we can help you with. So I hope you enjoy. Thanks!
I’m going to talk, today, to you trust question fans, and, what I’m going to talk about is there difference between a trust amendment and an amendment and restatement. So if you want to make changes to your living trust, which should you use? Well, it depends on the extent of the changes.
If you are going to make a few changes here and there, then that’s an amendment. Just, you know, changing the parts of it that needs changing and the rest of it stays in place. If you are going to change the basic structure of it, we have a lot of people that had older trusts where their planning was driven by a fear of estate taxes that doesn’t exist anymore. Where we’re, kind of, doing a major restructuring of it. That’s an amendment and restatement.
If you will, I call it a, sort of like, an equivalent of a “gut rehab” of a house. It’s the same building, with the same street address, so that you don’t have to redo the funding of the trust. The assets can still stay in the name of the same trust, but everything else, you’ve taken the Etch A Sketch, shaken it, and it’s all gone, and you’re drawing a new line. So, if you have that situation, that’s when you want to do an amendment and restatement. Thanks!
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