What happens when non-probate accounts are placed into a trust when they were meant to transfer free of trust to you? Can you get trust property separated from the trust through a West Palm Beach court order? Before you run into court you may want to see what happened to a plaintiff with a similar contention in an Illinois Court of Appeals case.
Funding a Trust
- One common mistake in Delray Beach trusts is forgetting to fund a trust.
- After you write out your Delray Beach trust charter you have to retitle your property so that it belongs to the trust.
- This includes real estate, accounts and other property like stocks.
- What happens if you forget to fund a trust?
- One possible thing that could happen is your descendants try to piecemeal the trust together after they are made personal representative of the estate.
- This eliminates a large portion if not all of the tax benefits that the trust offered.
- More so, you may run into worse problems down the road when non-trust property is put into the trust.
- If you were the planned beneficiary for that property can you petition the court for its return?
- You may want to see what the Illinois Court did in such a situation in a December 31, 2014 case
Estate of Migdal v. Migdal
- An appeal was brought to the Illinois Court of Appeals regarding a dismissed complaint against a trust estate.
- Plaintiff, the son of the decedent who formed a trust claimed that a Certificate of Deposit (CD) worth over $100k was wrongly included as trust property when he was meant to be the individual beneficiary.
- The case got even more complicated when the trust had used the CD as collateral on a loan.
- The court said that he failed to establish a right to the property and dismissed the case.
- Do you agree?
- How can he prove that the property is his?
- Experienced Palm Beach probate litigators know that the fundamental problem here was that the trust was funded to late after the parents had declined into old age (one had already died).
Want to learn more?
Check out the entire case by clicking here.