A Will is a legal document that can name guardians for your children, name an executor to take care of things after your death and designate who you want to receive your money and other stuff.  After your death, your Will needs to be interpreted by a Court through a process called probate.  This process can be long and expensive in some States and it's totally public in every State.  If you really want things to be as easy as possible for your family, a Will alone is not the best idea.

The only foolproof way to avoid probate and make things easy for your loved ones is to own your assets in a fully funded Living Trust.

Think of a Living Trust as a box that holds all of your assets, including houses, bank accounts, brokerage accounts, and business interests.  During your lifetime, you will want to make sure that every single one of these assets gets into the box of your Living Trust.  

Now, a Trust isn’t really a box.  It's an agreement.  It's an agreement between the Grantor of the Trust (also called the creator, trustor, settlor, trustmaker ... all the same name for the one who has the assets) and the Trustee of the Trust.  The Grantor of the Trust gives assets to the Trustee of the Trust to hold title to the assets for the benefit of the beneficiary.  Here’s what’s cool about all that.  As long as you are alive, you are the Grantor, Trustee and Beneficiary, so you haven’t given up any control by putting your assets into a Trust.

So, how do you get your assets into the box if there is no box?

You change the title on each one of your bank accounts, brokerage accounts, houses, and everything else you own into the name of your Trust.  So now, when your statements come in the mail, they say the name of your Trust on the top instead of your own name.  The only thing you don’t do this with is life insurance and retirement accounts.  For those, you change the beneficiary.  

Then, if you are in an accident, whoever you name as Trustee will work with a private personal lawyer to get access to the assets in the Trust and hold them for your beneficiaries in a continuing trust or transfer them to your beneficiaries and terminate the Trust.  This process is generally quicker and less expensive than probate and always totally private.

Even when you have a Trust, you still should have a Will as a back-up document in case when you die something you own is not owned properly by your Trust.  Try to make sure this doesn't happen, but just in case you should still have a Will.

With all of this, I strongly believe that the documents themselves are far less important than having a relationship with a personal lawyer who will guide you to make smart decisions about all of this while you are living and be there for your family when you can’t be.  Trusts, Wills - both important, but your family deserves the comfort of a trusted advisor who knew you and what’s important to you, if something happens to you.