Boyfriends and homes. Sons and estates. This week, our "Ask the Experts" focus is on wills and estates, with answers by Trudy Nearn, estate attorney and co-founder of Generations law firm.
We've also added a new "Ask the Expert" to our lineup of financial experts: Rodney Brown, president and CEO of the California Bankers Association, who is available through October, answering questions on banking. He joins our other sacbee.com experts on financial planning, investments and taxes.
To read their advice – or to post your own questions, go to www.sacbee.com/ask.
Trudy Nearn, wills and estate planning attorney
My boyfriend and I just bought a house together, where he contributed half of the down payment. The house is in my name only because I had the better credit and needed the tax write-off.
My concern is: If I die, I want the house to be paid off and go to him. I have a $250,000 life insurance policy, which would more than cover it, but my daughter is the beneficiary. I understand that I can't "designate" a portion to him to pay off the house. What do you suggest to ensure he will be covered should something happen to me?
Your issues can be addressed in lots of different ways. Probably the best is to have a written agreement with your boyfriend that addresses all of the possibilities – what if you die, what if he dies, what if you two break up, what if you sell the house, etc.
You can have a living trust own the house and own your life insurance, and the trust can be the beneficiary of the life insurance. The trust can take care of the things that you've agreed to in the written agreement with your boyfriend.
Don't try to write the agreement or the trust yourselves. You might forget to address an issue, or address it in a way that is not clear. It will be more expensive to fix it or fight about it later than to have an attorney draft it properly in the first place.
Do we need a living trust? I'm 63 and in fairly good health. My husband is 65 with a rare disease. We have one married son and one granddaughter. We own our home with a mortgage, have one credit card and minimal savings. Our income consists of PERS retirement and both receive Social Security.
Our attorney said all we need is a will but everything I read says that our estate will be held up in probate. When we both die, the PERS retirement account rolls over to our son for the next eight years. After that, there is about $75,000 in life insurance that he could use to make the house payments until the home is sold.
Are we leaving a financial mess to our son?
It's nice that you are thinking ahead about whether you are leaving a financial mess for your son. It is not whether having a will instead of a trust creates a financial mess. If you don't have a trust, it certainly will be more expensive for your son when you die and will take longer for him to deal with the estate process in probate.
The reason that I like a good trust-based estate plan is that it puts into place all of the documents needed to make it easier on your spouse and your son when you become incapacitated or die. Usually, the trustee (in this case, your son) hires an attorney to help them understand what to do, but the trustee can pay the attorney for however much help he or she needs.
If you just have a will, your assets will pass at your death through the probate process, where the attorney gets paid a percentage of the gross value of the estate's assets. Probate takes longer and costs more than a trust administration. In California, anyone who owns a house is usually better off, in my opinion, with a living trust.
