09/03/2026
I once saw a trust that cost five figures to draft and held nothing at all.
Every account was still titled in the owner's personal name. The document was beautiful. It just didn't own a thing. The family found that out at the worst possible time, after he was gone.
Here's what bothers me about it. It wasn't the client's fault.
Most people have no idea a trust has to be “funded,” that signing the document is only step one and the real work is retitling the accounts and deeding the property into it. Even a simple trust is
full of language nobody outside a law office actually understands.
Sometimes the client even gets handed a letter explaining how to move everything over, but who has the time or the training to go do all that? They were given homework and told it was a plan. So the binder goes on a shelf and they assume they're taken care of.
In 26 years I've seen it happen more than once. 3 places these plans fall apart, and it's almost never the client's fault:
1. The wrong successor trustee - Your brother isn't the right trustee just because he's your brother. The job takes time, a head for numbers, and the backbone to make hard calls while everyone around the table is grieving. Put the wrong person in that seat and what should be a six month job can drag into a three year family fight, with a probate attorney billing by the hour to referee it. Most folks were never told what the role actually requires.
2. A trust that never got funded - The lawyer drafts it. Everybody feels good. But nobody moves the accounts or the land into it,
and nobody walks the client through how. So the trust holds nothing, and the estate you were trying to keep out of probate runs right through it anyway. Getting the assets in there is the part people are quietly left to figure out on their own.
3. A business that doesn't match the plan - This is the one that costs families the most. If your operating agreement says one thing about what happens to your shares when you die, and your trust says something else, the operating agreement usually wins. Your kids can end up locked out of the very thing you spent a lifetime building, no matter what your will says. Almost nobody realizes those two documents have to agree.
If you built something worth protecting, you shouldn't have to become an expert to keep it protected. A good plan isn't a binder and a to-do list you take home. It's something somebody
finishes with you, and then checks to make sure it would actually hold.
If you're not sure yours would, that's worth an afternoon to find out. A lot easier to fix now than to leave it for your family to sort out later.
