"A trust is a device that allows you to transfer legal title of your property to another person (or to yourself as trustee) to hold for the benefit of yet another person (beneficiary) in the cheapest and most effective way."

The benefit of having a trust as opposed to a will?

"A trust gives the trustee the legal authority to distribute assets immediately to the beneficiaries based on the terms of the trust. No court is involved. No public notice of death is required as it is with a will. All that is required is a death certificate and a trust document that describes how things are to be distributed through the trust. Because a trust bypasses the court system, or probate, there are no fees, and there is no public record of the value of your estate, protecting your privacy." (see this page for much more information)

I write this article because my husband and I are in the process of setting up a living trust for ourselves, and I thought writing about the experience might inspire others to try and take charge of their finances as well. We met with a woman who asked us all kinds of questions about mainly money and guardianship issues, and we were required to gather together copies of nearly everything that shows we are worth money - bank statements, the deed to the house, pink slips for the cars, retirement account statements, life insurance, and so on. If you can't easily put your hands on all of these papers, I suggest taking care of that now, regardless of whether or not you ever set up a trust. In the case of your death people need to be able to find these documents. It's especially important for families to get things in order, in case both parents are killed and a guardian needs to step in and start sorting out financial issues in addition to taking over care of your child(ren).

The next thing we need to do before our trust can be executed is write in our own handwriting a list of things that go directly to certain people (namely family members) in the event that my husband and I are both killed at the same time. We need to look around our house and imagine that an estate sale is going to be held. What things should absolutely not be sold? And to whom should they go? This is what we need to write out. We also need to write out instructions for after our deaths - cremation versus burial, and such.

In a few weeks we execute our trust. The woman we have hired will be doing the paperwork to name our trust as beneficiary for all of our policies that have beneficiaries designated.

It has been a lot to think about, and stressful for me to gather all of my paperwork together, but I feel good about taking responsibility for these matters. More importantly, it's good to know that in the very unlikely event that something were to happen to both me and my husband, our daughter is provided for.