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Written by Jonathan J. David Jonathan J. David

Dear Jonathan: I am proud of myself. I just finished preparing my own trust. It wasn’t that hard to do with all the various forms to pick from on the internet.

I do have one question, however. How do I put my home into my trust? Do I simply include a paragraph in my trust that says that at my death my home is owned by my trust? I want to make sure I get this right so my house doesn’t go through probate.

Jonathan says: No, including a paragraph in your trust stating that your home is automatically owned by your trust at the time of your death will not be effective to transfer your home to your trust.

When you purchased your home, the prior owner conveyed its ownership interest in the home to you by executing a deed. You will need to do the same thing here — prepare and execute a deed conveying your interest in the home to your trust or, to be more exact, to the trustee of your trust.

You didn’t ask for my advice regarding the trust you prepared using the online forms you found, but it is important that you have that trust reviewed by an estate planning attorney. There are thousands of forms that can be found on the internet, but those forms are by their nature generic and will not address a person’s specific personal circumstances.

Another problem with generic internet forms is that if you pick the wrong form or insert the wrong provisions, you can end up hurting rather than helping yourself.

This is because there are many different types of trusts that are utilized for very different purposes, so you have to know what type of trust you are trying to prepare and make sure that whatever forms you are looking at are consistent with that type of trust.

For example, I recently had a client attempt to prepare his own trust just like you and, in so doing, he pulled provisions from a variety of different types of trusts he found on the internet. These trusts included revocable trusts, a variety of different types of irrevocable trusts, and certain other specialized trusts that were totally different from the type of trust he was trying to prepare.

Consequently, the trust he created turned out to be a hodgepodge of different trusts and a complete mess.

Further, unless you are knowledgeable about trusts and how to prepare them, you will have no way of knowing whether you included the correct provisions for the type of trust you wanted to create. In other words, you don’t know what you don’t know.

I recommend you have an estate planning attorney at least review the trust you prepared to make sure there are no problems with that instrument. If problems are found, that attorney can help correct those problems.

That attorney can also help with preparing the deed conveying your home to the trust. Preparing a deed may appear to be a simple matter, but deeds are more complicated than you think and are easy to screw up if you don’t know what you are doing.

Finally, if you decide to engage an attorney to review your trust, you should consider asking that attorney to review with you the other types of estate planning documents that should be included as part of your overall estate plan. Having a trust can be beneficial, but it is not necessarily the most important estate planning document to have.

Whether you choose to follow that attorney’s advice is up to you; however, at least you will have had the opportunity to hear what types of other estate planning documents are available to you. Good luck.

Jonathan J. David is a shareholder in the law firm of Foster, Swift, Collins & Smith, P.C., 1700 E. Beltline N.E., Grand Rapids, MI 49525.