How do I make changes to my living trust?

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, everyone. This Robert Mansour, and today I want to talk about making changes to your living trust. Let's say you have a living trust that says what happens with your assets and things like that after you pass away, who manages your assets if something should happen to you etc. Let's say you want to make a change. What do we call that? That's called an "amendment" to your living trust. If you make an amendment to your living trust, that's fine. Basically, you can say "Paragraph C, section four, shall now read as follows..." and you get rid of the old section C subsection four and you put in the new paragraph. Then a couple of years later, you do another amendment and you say paragraph D is going to be changed.

Then two or three years later or five years later, you decide to make another amendment. If you keep doing this as the years go on, it starts to get very complicated. Then the next thing you know, you've got 10 or 15 different documents and you're trying to figure out what's what. That makes things very difficult for your family and for your trustees to manage.

At some point, I might recommend, as well as other lawyers might recommend, something called a "restatement." A restatement is basically one massive amendment that "restates" all the terms of your living trust from scratch. Let's say you have the "Smith Family Trust" from 1985 and you want to change the whole thing or you've had way too many amendments and now it's like putting patches on pants.

If you have too many "patches" on your to fix a hole here and to fix a hole there, at some point it makes a lot of sense to buy new pants. That's what a restatement is. It's a brand new living trust. Now even though all the provisions of the restatement are different or new rather (all the provisions are new), there is one thing that stays the same - the name of your original trust. It's still called the "Smith Family Trust" dated such and such 1985 and you'll still hold all your assets in the same name, but all of the provisions of the trust have been restated. That's why we call it a restatement or a restated amendment.

If your trust really needs to be gutted, and you need to start over, sometimes it makes sense to do a restatement rather than do yet another amendment. I hope you found this video helpful. My name Robert Mansour and thanks for watching.