Welcome to Trust, Estate Planning for New Families. I’m Tara, the owner of Trust, and as we continue to learn about the various estate planning documents that make up an estate plan, we are going to talk about what is a trust? A lot of people feel like they hear they should have a trust, but don’t know exactly why. We’re going to cover the basics right now. A trust is essentially a set of instructions for how your property should be managed during your life and upon your death. There are a lot of benefits to having a trust. Probably the biggest benefit is the ability for long-term planning that you don’t get with other documents just on your own. So that’s where you can say things like, my kid will receive a third of their assets when they’re 25, a third when they’re 30, the remainder at 35, or something like that. A trust also gives you the ability to avoid probate. Everyone’s probably heard about probate, and we can get into detail about that later, but if we can avoid it, it’s nice to, and having a trust is the way to do that. A trust also lets your successor trustee manage your assets in the event of incapacity, where you’re unable to do so, and we get to avoid having a court appoint a guardian for you. There’s also a certain element of privacy that comes along with having a trust that you don’t get with a will on its own. These are why, even if you don’t come to this process, feeling like a trust is critical for your estate plan, there’s a lot of benefits to having one.