The easiest way to create a Trust

A Living Trust is a personal entity that you put your assets into. Think of it like a personal LLC that you put everything you own in. Except it doesn’t protect you from liability like an LLC, it protects your assets and heirs from probate.

Probate is the expensive and complicated (12-18 months) court process where a judge decides what happens to your assets when you die or become incapacitated. Creating a living trust allows your assets to completely circumvent probate and seamlessly transfer to whoever you want.

In addition to being able to assign who you want to inherit your assets, a Trust also allows you to assign someone to manage it (your successor trustee).

Instead of going through probate, your Successor Trustee takes control of the Trust and distributes your assets per your instructions. 

The person you select as Successor Trustee should be your most trusted person. Like a best friend or closest family member.

At Dynasty, we believe everyone needs a Living Trust. If you have assets today, or plan to acquire assets in the future, you should put your home in a Trust. That way when you buy your first house or get startup shares, you can immediately title them in your Trust and never be left unprotected.

Probate is the court facilitated legal process that takes place if you don’t have a defensible living trust in place at time of death. This process can take anywhere from 9 to 18 months and cost you up to 10% of the total value of your estate in court fees and attorney costs. 

The process determines:

1. Who your heirs/ beneficiaries are
2. What assets you have
3. How much your assets are worth
4. Who will handle your financial responsibilities (selling your property, transferring your estate, and honoring your financial obligations)

It is estimated that ~3 billion dollars are lost by Americans in probate fees every single year, and a majority of that goes to attorney fees. The good news is that creating a living trust can help you avoid this. Living trusts detail specific instructions for your estate which get carried out by a designated successor trustee. This allows your estate to be transferred without court intervention.

To create a trust you will:

1. Go through Dynasty’s simple online workflow to gather your details and generate your digital living trust.
2. Schedule time with one of our online notaries to virtually sign and notarize your trust.
3. We will provide you with a digital copy and securely store the original notarized document in a bank level vault. 

Most online trust providers only take you part of the way by selling you a trust template. Lawyers will take you the entire way but in most cases still don’t want the burden of securely storing your physical documents. Dynasty Advantage will not only help you create your documents, but we also enable you to remotely sign and notarize them as well. Then we physically and securely store your living trust for you. 

Safe storage is an essential part of the process because a trust is only valid if it can be furnished when necessary. If trust documents are lost or damaged, then all the steps you took to properly prepare your estate plan are moot. Dynasty takes the burden of storage away from you and ensures that the right people will be given access to your trust if events call for it.

Dynasty’s living trusts sit at the intersection between online stationery stores (how we characterize every online provider that exists today) and a full blown law firm experience. Our offering goes far beyond the trust creation workflow of online stationery stores that sell you a template and require you to notarize and store your plans separately. However, unlike a law firm, we are not providing any legal advice.

Dynasty Cloud enables you to remotely create, sign, notarize, and store your trust documents. Additionally, we allow you to come back, visualize your plan, and make changes as life events occur. This entire process is necessary for creating a defensible and up to date living trust.

The final step of the process in making your trust defensible is transferring assets into your trust. For more on that process, please see our article on transferring assets.

For most, the answer is probably not. Today you can go into any online/offline stationery store and purchase a living trust template. Then you just need to fill it out, sign, notarize and store it securely. As events happen in your life (asset purchase, child’s birth, marriage, etc) you would open the template and fill out all the details again, including any updates. Then again you would need to sign, notarize and store it securely.

The trust process is trivial for most people as it primarily requires assigning beneficiaries and transferring title of your assets from your individual name to your living trust. For anyone that is seeking legal advice or has an overly complicated estate, an attorney is highly recommended.

Remote notary legislation currently exists in many states and includes many changes enacted during the covid-19 pandemic due to social distancing requirements. This allows Dynasty to take advantage of state specific notary laws to ensure that your living trust can be legally and fully remotely notarized in all 50 states. The process involves online video conferencing and multiple methods of identification. At Dynasty we believe that remote notary is the future and are making it a core offering of our business.

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Dynasty living revocable trusts do not have an impact on your taxes and do not make things more complicated. You will continue to report your income the same way you did before.

While a living revocable trust is a separate legal entity from you as an individual, it is not a separate tax entity. This means that the trust’s income is still considered your personal income for tax purposes, and you will need to report it on your personal tax return. As the grantor (creator) of the trust, you will typically continue to pay taxes on the income earned by the trust, in the same way that you would if the assets were held in your own name.