The Living Trust Advisor

CHAPTER 1 How You Established Your Living Trust Without a Clear Understanding of What It Is and How It Works Or, You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know about Your Living Trust

Before your real Living Trust training begins in Chapter 2, I feel the need to address a point that is somewhat obvious, which I will state in your first person: “I already have a Living Trust. Why do I need your training session on the Living Trust when I have already received that information?”

In the Pregame Warm-Up, I made the bold and very broad assumption that you do not know much about your Living Trust, even if you have one. How did you react to such a presumptive assertion? Did you nod your head in recognition? Or did you fling this book across the room (or the bookstore) in disbelief and anger?

Let me tell you how I came to the assumption that you know very little, if anything at all, about your Living Trust, the document that your lawyer prepared, or you drafted yourself with LegalZoom and that you believe you already know all about.

What Does It All Mean?

I am an estate planning attorney. I am in the business of putting together inheritance plans. In the old days, you would have set forth your inheritance instructions in a will. Nowadays, those instructions will be set forth in a Living Trust. In effect, this makes me a Living Trust lawyer.

I learned this business from my father, Gerald M. Condon, who, in the early 1970s, was perhaps the first lawyer in the United States to conduct Living Trust ...