THE LIVING TRUST PLAYBOOK: How to Decide, Design, Fund, Maintain, and Pass On Your Estate Without Leaving Your Family a Mess (The Financial Planning Series) - Softcover

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Turn Your Living Trust Into a Complete, Coordinated Estate Plan

A living trust can be one of the most useful tools in an estate plan. But signing a trust document doesn't mean your estate plan is finished.

Your home, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, life insurance, bank accounts, beneficiary designations, and other assets may all follow different rules when you die or become incapacitated. If those pieces don't work together, your family may face unnecessary confusion, delays, expenses, or unintended outcomes.

The Living Trust Playbook gives you a practical, step-by-step roadmap to understand, build, fund, coordinate, and maintain a living trust without getting lost in complicated legal jargon. It also includes a downloadable Implementation Kit to help you put every step into action.

Inside this book, you'll discover:

• How Living Trusts Really Work: Understand what a revocable living trust can and cannot do for you, your family, and your estate.
• The Trust Decision Framework: Determine whether a living trust makes sense for your situation, and when a simpler will-based plan may be appropriate.
• The 3-Bucket Asset Map: Classify your assets into Trust-Owned Assets, Beneficiary-Designated Assets, and Other Transfer Methods so you can see how your entire estate fits together.
• How to Properly Fund Your Trust: Understand why signing the trust is only the beginning, and identify the assets that may need to be transferred or coordinated.
• How to Coordinate Your Estate Plan: Bring your trust, will, beneficiary designations, powers of attorney, property ownership, and other transfer methods into one coordinated plan.
• How to Plan for Incapacity: Understand the roles of successor trustees, powers of attorney, and other important documents before your family needs them.
• Retirement Accounts & Beneficiary Designations: Learn why these assets require special attention and why your trust does not automatically control them.
• Real-World Scenarios & Common Mistakes: See how small oversights, like an unfunded trust or an outdated beneficiary form, can undermine a well-designed plan.
• How to Keep Your Plan Current: Use a practical annual review to account for changes in your family, finances, assets, beneficiaries, and documents.

BONUS: THE LIVING TRUST IMPLEMENTATION KIT

Four downloadable resources to fill in, print, and share (access details inside the book):

• The Living Trust Organizer (Excel workbook): Every worksheet from the book in one workbook, including the 3-Bucket Asset Map, Master Funding Checklist, Beneficiary Alignment Audit, and Annual Trust Checkup, with dropdowns, status tracking, and a one-page plan summary.
• The Successor Trustee Handoff Packet: An information sheet, what to do during incapacity, the four phases of administration after death, and a record log for your trustee.
• Attorney & CPA Conversation Scripts: Specific questions for blended families, out-of-state property, business interests, retirement account beneficiaries, and moving to a new state, plus an Attorney Meeting Preparation Checklist.
• The Family Trust Binder Kit: A cover insert, spine labels, ten printable section dividers, and a guide to what belongs behind each one.

Print pieces come as PDFs plus editable Word files.

Whether you're considering a living trust for the first time or already have one sitting in a filing cabinet, The Living Trust Playbook helps you move from having estate-planning documents to having a coordinated plan your family can understand and administer.

Plan today. Coordinate your estate. Give your family a clearer path forward.

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