Meurer & Potter Law Office, Denver, Colorado
Revocable Living Trust Attorney Denver
A Revocable Living Trust is a legal document that shares many similarities with a will. It contains your instructions on what to do with your assets upon your death. However, unlike a will, this type of trust:
- Avoids the need to probate your estate
- Remains private whereas as probate records are public
- Can control all of your assets
- Can prevent the court from controlling your assets if you become incapacitated
- Can immediately pass your assets directly to your beneficiaries after your death
When you set up a Revocable Living Trust, assets are transferred from your name to the name of your trust, which you control. Legally, you no longer own anything so therefore there is nothing for the courts to administer when you die or become incapacitated. However, everything now belongs to your trust and you are the trustee. As the trustee of your own trust, you can do anything you did before including buying or selling assets, managing your money, giving gifts and investing.
A Revocable Living Trust operates under your social security number and you even file the same tax return. Nothing changes but the names on the titles of the assets. Commonly, you are also the first beneficiary of the trust and provisions within the document transfer the property to your heirs upon your death. In the meanwhile, you manage all assets and property for your beneficiaries.
The trust agreement also outlines details on your rights to change the trust, the duties of the trustee, how to distribute your property, how to provide for your family and when and how to select a trustee.
If you’d like to know if a Revocable Living Trust is the right option for your estate, contact our attorneys at the Meurer & Potter Law Office. We will walk you through everything you need to know and put together all documents required to properly set up your trust. Our focus is protecting your lifetime of hard work.
Frequently Asked Questions About Revocable Living Trusts
Insights to help you decide whether a revocable living trust fits your situation.
Our FAQs offer practical guidance about trusts. They are written to help you stay informed, not overwhelmed.
Both documents say who gets what. The difference is what your family goes through to make it happen. A will has to be filed with the court and administered through probate, which becomes a public record and takes months. A revocable living trust passes assets directly to your beneficiaries without court involvement, stays private, and keeps working if you become incapacitated rather than only at death. Most of our trust clients still sign a short pour-over will alongside the trust to catch anything left out.
Only for the assets you actually move into it. The trust controls property that has been retitled in the trust’s name, so a house still deeded to you personally, or an account still in your own name, goes through probate anyway. This step is called funding, and it is where most do-it-yourself trusts fall apart. We handle the deeds and the account retitling as part of setting the trust up.
No, and this is the most common misunderstanding we hear about these trusts. Because you keep full control and can revoke it at any time, the assets are still treated as yours, which means they remain available to creditors and countable for Medicaid. If protecting assets from long-term care costs is the goal, that calls for irrevocable planning, and the timing matters because of the five-year look-back.
You can, and plenty of married couples serve as co-trustees together while both are living. Naming two adult children as co-trustees after you are gone is where it gets risky. If they have to agree on everything and they disagree, the trust stalls and the family can end up in court. We usually recommend one trustee with a clear successor, and we talk through the family dynamics before deciding.
A comprehensive trust-based estate plan typically costs between $1,500 and $5,000 or more, depending on how complex your situation is and how many supporting documents you need. We quote a flat fee and walk through all of it during your free consultation, so there are no surprises later.