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Q: We had created a revocable trust to hold title to a family home back in 2007. The attorney that created the trust for us has since retired. We need to make some simple changes to the trust. Our son has since married and has two young children, and we’d like to make changes to the trust to cover the new additions to our family.

How can I go about making this change? What will be the approximate cost? I also requested that my son create his own revocable trust. Can you give us any guidance?

A: Any estate planning attorney can help you make changes to your revocable trust. That same attorney can also assist your son with creating a revocable trust for his use and to put his assets into trust.

When you go to an estate planning attorney and have them prepare a living trust (also called a revocable trust), the document allows you to transfer real estate and many other assets into the trust. So instead of owning a home, bank accounts or other assets in your own name, you own them in the name of your trust. You still control the assets in the trust as the trustee of the trust, but you’re creating a mechanism where you have a trustee that handles the affairs of the trust and the beneficiary that owns what is in the trust.

For most people that create a living or revocable trust, the trustee and the beneficiary are one and the same. What we like about a trust is that when you create the trust, you can designate the replacement trustee and the replacement beneficiary for some or all of the assets in the trust upon your death. It’s a great mechanism for transferring assets when a person dies because these changes happen automatically. No probate required.

If the trustee is ill or becomes incapacitated, most trusts will allow someone else to easily step in and handle the affairs of the trust.

Time flies, right? When you set up this trust, your children were small and grandchildren weren’t in the picture. Now, you want to change who gets what and when. And, who might replace you and your spouse as trustee when you die.

Keeping beneficiaries updated is often forgotten. If you created the trust before you got married and had kids, you might have named your best buddy at the time as your successor trustee. Thirty years later, you might not want that person handling your financial affairs upon your incapacitation or death. You may prefer to have your wife or children to be the successor trustees when you die. You may also have a very different plan for how your assets should be distributed.

It’s important to get it right. Don’t risk doing it yourself and messing up the trust document. The purpose of these trusts is to make it easy for your next of kin to distribute your assets and avoid having to go to probate court to get approval to sell or transfer assets.

We can’t tell you how much it will cost you. While your changes sound simple, if you sit down with an attorney, they might turn out to be more complicated. We also don’t know how complicated your trust is or what other changes you might want to make.

Instead, ask friends for a referral or call around and find an estate planning attorney that you like, who fits your budget. If you can’t find anyone, then call your local bar association, ask for the head of the estate planning committee, and call that person. You might work with them or get a referral to a handful of experts. Shop around, compare your notes, then select the person you’ll hopefully work with throughout the process of tweaking your estate plan.

Finally, if any of our readers have a living or revocable trust, please make sure that the assets you intend to hold in the trust are actually in the trust. You don’t know how many deals Sam comes across where people create a trust and then never transfer the ownership of their real estate into the trust. The same goes for other assets that can be put into the trust such as stocks, bonds and other accounts. Remember, if a trust is empty, you’ve wasted the money to create it.

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(Ilyce Glink is the author of “100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask” (4th Edition). She is also the CEO of Best Money Moves, a financial wellness technology company. Samuel J. Tamkin is a Chicago-based real estate attorney. Contact Ilyce and Sam through her website, ThinkGlink.com.)

©2025 Ilyce R. Glink and Samuel J. Tamkin. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.