The step most attorneys skip — and the reason most trusts fail. We retitle your land, accounts, and entities into your trust so it actually works when your family needs it.
Here is one of the most common — and most costly — mistakes in estate planning: a family pays an attorney $3,000 to draft a beautiful Revocable Living Trust. The documents are signed, notarized, and placed in a drawer. Everyone feels good.
Then the patriarch dies. And the family discovers that the land is still titled in his personal name. The bank accounts are still in his name. The LLC membership interests were never transferred. The trust controls nothing, because nobody ever funded it.
The result? Full probate — the exact thing the trust was supposed to prevent.
At Midwest Ag Law, trust funding is not an add-on. It is a core part of every estate plan we build. We handle the deeds, the bank paperwork, the beneficiary designation changes, and the entity membership transfers. When we’re done, your trust actually controls your assets.
Trust funding is the process of changing legal ownership of your assets from your personal name to the name of your trust. For a farm family, this typically includes:
We handle all of this for you. Most clients don’t lift a finger beyond signing a few forms. The process typically takes 2-4 weeks after documents are signed.
We don’t do hourly billing, and we don’t hand you a stack of paper and wish you luck. Our process is designed to be transparent, thorough, and completely finished when we’re done.
We compile a complete list of every asset that needs to be funded into the trust — every parcel, every account, every entity, every beneficiary designation.
We prepare trustee deeds for every parcel of land, assignment documents for LLC interests, and retitling paperwork for bank accounts and financial institutions.
We record the deeds with the county register of deeds, submit paperwork to banks and financial institutions, and confirm every asset has been properly retitled.
Every asset that should be in your trust — will be in your trust.
We prepare and record new deeds transferring every parcel into the trust. This includes farmland in multiple counties and states.
We coordinate with your bank to retitle checking, savings, and certificate accounts into the trust name.
We amend operating agreements and transfer membership interests so your business entities are properly owned by the trust.
If you already have a trust, we can review it and confirm it’s properly funded. If it’s not, we’ll fix it. Schedule a free consultation.
