08/11/2026
You paid for a living trust. It might be protecting nothing.
I see it constantly: a beautifully drafted revocable living trust, signed, notarized, sitting in a binder- and every asset it was supposed to protect is still titled in the person's individual name. When that happens, the trust is an empty box. And an empty box doesn't avoid probate.
Here's the part people miss. Signing the trust is only half the job. The other half is called funding- actually moving your assets into the trust. A trust only controls what it owns.
Funding means retitling things into the name of the trust:
→ Your home and other real estate — by recording a new deed
→ Bank and brokerage accounts — by changing the account title
→ Beneficiary designations — coordinated carefully, because retirement accounts carry tax rules a trust can trigger
Skip that step and here's what your family gets: the exact probate you paid a lawyer to help you avoid- public, slower, and more expensive- while your trust sits on the shelf doing nothing.
Most trusts I'm asked to "review" aren't badly drafted. They're just unfunded. The document was treated as the finish line when it was really the starting line.
We can help. www.libertylawidaho.com
