When you set up a trust, you will designate who you want to be the successor trustee. This is the trustee who takes over management of the trust estate when you pass away. Now, best practice is to have multiple layers or multiple lists of trustees to take over. And so you’ll want person A to be first, person B to be second and so on.

Now in the event that you have a trust that does not have a trustee listed, so for example, you list person A and person A passes away and you don’t have a trustee next in line, the beneficiaries can petition the court to appoint a trustee. But, we want to avoid going to court to keep costs down. So you should have a first position, second position and third position.

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Probate is required regard regardless of whether there is a will or not. So if someone has a will and they own more than $188,000 their estate will still have to go through probate.

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The answer to this question is it depends. It depends on how assets were held during the marriage by the spouses and it also depends on what types of assets the deceased spouse had in his or her name.

Now there are a number of ways to deal with assets that were owned by a deceased spouse. One way is that if the value of those assets is lower than the threshold for a small estate, then the surviving spouse may use a small estate affidavit to transfer property.

The surviving spouse also might be able to use what’s called a spousal set aside, which is similar to a quickie or a short form of probate.

The third way that a surviving spouse can avoid probate is to have already established a revocable trust and have the trust owning the assets of the married couple.

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Now, the process is that the person named the executor or another interested party will file a petition to probate the will. Once that petition is filed, there are certain intermediate court hearings and deadlines that have to be followed. Once those hearings and deadlines occur, the executor will file a request to distribute the assets and to close the estate. On average, it takes anywhere between 18 and 24 months for a probate case to go through the court process.

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The other way that a trustee can withdraw money or use money from an irrevocable trust is to pay bills related to the trust administration. So if the trustee hires an accountant or an attorney or a financial advisor, for example, the trustee can use trust assets from an irrevocable trust to pay for those professionals.

Quick Question Corner is a video segment where we answer common questions about estate planning and elder law. If you have similar questions, leave them in the comment section and we can feature them in one of our videos in the future.