Trusts Provide Asset Protection

Trusts can be a powerful and flexible estate planning tool. While basic wills serve to dictate how assets are passed onto the next generation, there are many protections they simply cannot provide. At Daniels, Porco & Lusardi, LLP, in New York’s Hudson Valley, our attorneys frequently recommend trusts for the purposes of:

• Asset protection: Putting assets, such as family business, life insurance or home, into a trust can provide significant protection from creditors, now and in the future.
• Estate tax avoidance: Having your assets in a trust may minimize estate taxes.
• Probate avoidance: If you have a trust in place, your loved ones may not be required to go through probate, potentially eliminating significant complexity and expense.
• Flexible distribution: With a simple will, assets are generally distributed at once. You can arrange a trust so that your assets are distributed over time, so you can be assured that your loved ones will benefit from them for many years to come.

How To Determine If A Trust Is Right For You

We are conscious of the cost of planning your estate. The goal is to protect your assets, not to deplete them in the process. We recommend only the estate planning tools that are necessary to accomplish your goals. That means discussing your goals with you and educating you about all available options. We frequently recommend trusts in unique situations, where you want to accomplish more than simply naming who gets what property. For example, we may recommend a trust in cases where a beneficiary could benefit from having assets distributed over time or at the discretion of a third-party trustee, where a beneficiary desires to minimize estate taxes upon his or her death or when a beneficiary has special needs and a lump-sum inheritance may jeopardize his or her eligibility for government benefits.

There is much more to adding a trust to an estate plan than choosing the right type of trust and creating it. Unfortunately, that is where many lawyers stop. We make work with our clients on proper funding of your trust, meaning the assets are transferred into the trust, so you get the intended protections from its creation.

Learn More About Trusts

As dedicated estate, trust, and will lawyers, we provide services to clients from the Hudson Valley, Pawling, Carmel, and Westchester NY, Danbury CT, and beyond. For more information about trusts, call us at 845-350-2837. You can also contact us by email.