Your trust may no longer be protecting your home from estate taxes!  Or Probate! What?  Let me first say I am not a lawyer and I am not giving tax advice, but I am sharing a growing trend I am seeing that is undoing all the planning, protection and efforts you may have put into executing your trust.

This could very well apply to you if you’ve REFINANCED since you initially put your home in your trust.  You see, banks don’t want to lend to trusts, they lend money to people.  So, if you did refinance, most likely you took your home out of the trust to do the new lower rate mortgage………did you put the vesting of the house back into the name of the trust?  (The vesting is the term for how you hold title to the property)

If you didn’t take this last step (the escrow officer would have asked you for the declaration page of your trust or the entire document) to make sure the wording exactly matched your trust’s name.  Then you should make sure you take care of this right away.  You can ask me to look up the vesting on your property for you, if you want to double check.  It is pretty simple to correct, you as the current owner(s) just need to do a grant deed to the trust and record the document.  I can help you with who can help you with that too, it is very inexpensive to correct the situation.

Looking out for you,

Cathy Sarmento

530-320-5783  or [email protected]