Life Estate

Categories: Insurance, Real Estate

You can live there forever.

When you sign a lease, it might last a few years. Or maybe you're so afraid of commitment that you search out month-to-month agreements. If that's the case, you'd hate a life estate. It's essentially a lifetime lease.

The process is often used for estate planning. By using a life estate, a person can pass property to an heir without including it in their estate.

Your grandma is getting up there in years. She sets up a life estate. Meemaw has rights over the property until she dies. At that point, true ownership passes to you.

Fun fact: in this scenario, you are known as the remainderman...which sounds like the name of a made-for-Netflix horror movie.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is a Living Trust?35 Views

00:00

Finance allah shmoop what is a living trust Well a

00:07

regular old trust is a legal vehicle into which assets

00:10

are placed so that their distribution or rather who gets

00:14

what from them when the owner of that trust dies

00:16

is legally clear How does that matter Like at all

00:20

Sounds like a lot of paperwork for more or less

00:22

the privilege that pay lawyers well if you had don't

00:25

have clarity as to who gets what When you die

00:28

the government often has the right to tax the crap

00:31

out of whatever you have left in the form of

00:33

filtering through it in a process called probate and it's

00:37

being like probed in a not a good way Anyway

00:40

probate is basically a process of figuring out if in

00:43

fact your will is your will And if you are

00:47

in fact will so living trust is one that lives

00:50

while you do when you die it gets distributed and

00:53

beyond Reducing taxes and giving clarity is the how your

00:57

dearly departed spirit wants its assets distributed A living trust

01:01

can also adjust to your moods Living trust our revokable

01:05

which means you can change your mind and revoke it

01:08

I'ii take it back after you die it becomes irrevocable

01:11

Unless you can legitimately send your spirit back from the

01:14

dead and convince a judge to let a lawyer amend

01:17

it And you can't that's just a joke you're living

01:19

trust basically comprises three sets of people you are trusting

01:22

in the form of bringing them inside your financial tent

01:26

Well the first player is you that is you are

01:28

a separate party in this some party And it is

01:30

you who creates the trust and divines who gets what

01:33

when and how you kaname yourself and potentially your spouse

01:36

as trustees beneficiaries That means that until you die at

01:40

least you are in charge And then your spouse if

01:43

you have one is in charge after you go you

01:46

know kick the bucket The likely successor trustees are your

01:49

kids So yeah the second player is the trustee the

01:52

person in charge of your assets after you die and

01:55

it's their job to be sure that your assets are

01:58

disposed of the way you want him to be Well

02:00

the trusty also deals with conflicts defending the wishes in

02:03

your trust The way that person presumes you'd want them

02:06

Defended nor example you're loving spouse the fifth one the

02:09

one who actually loved you for you all right the

02:12

third component of living trust the beneficiaries the ones who

02:16

get the one point three million dollars in proceeds from

02:18

the sale of your mansion in palo alto Yeah this

02:21

one it says nike on it That shoebox thing Yeah

02:24

they're the ones who get the house the custom range

02:26

rover with pure gold rims and passenger side ejector seat

02:29

And all of this is done in large part so

02:31

that your airs don't have to go through probate which

02:34

saves them a ton of time and money in grief

02:36

Your heirs don't want to have to live in their

02:38

cars while your assets wend their way through the government

02:41

process he's over years And the will does not have

02:44

to get filed publicly which means that even after you

02:47

are dead you can maintain privacy Generally the more assets

02:50

you have the more important it is to have a

02:52

living trust If you have booked guests now probably doesn't 00:02:55.67 --> [endTime] matter

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)