Retitle assets into a fully-amendable trust: skip probate entirely, keep the transfer private, retain 100% control.
An RLT is a grantor trust you create, control, and can amend or revoke at will. You serve as your own trustee, so nothing about your day-to-day changes — but assets titled in the trust pass to beneficiaries by the trust's terms rather than through probate court. Benefits: avoid 3–18 months of probate and 2–7% of estate value in court/attorney fees, keep the disposition private (probate files are public record), and provide seamless incapacity management via successor trustee (no conservatorship). Note what it does NOT do: no estate-tax reduction (assets remain in your taxable estate under §2038) and no creditor protection while you're alive. Funding is the whole ballgame — an unfunded RLT does nothing.
Click Generate advisory deep dive for mechanics, IRC citations, a step-by-step execution plan, a worked numeric example on your profile, costs, risks, and this-week actions.
An unfunded revocable trust avoids nothing. Retitle deeds, brokerage, LLC interests and business shares in the right order.
Married-couple-only titling in ~25 states makes the asset unreachable by ONE spouse's individual creditors.
Transfer-on-death and payable-on-death registrations move brokerage, bank, and (in 30+ states) real estate outside probate at zero cost.
Run every asset through one matrix: probate exposure, basis step-up, creditor reach, gift-tax event, incapacity coverage.
Out-of-state real estate triggers a separate probate in each state. A trust or LLC collapses them into one.
Title passes automatically to the survivor with no probate — free to set up, but with real basis and creditor tradeoffs.