When you pass away, your loved ones normally have to go through a legal process called succession or probate in order to deal with the property and debts you left behind. It involves lawyers, filing documents with the court, and getting court orders. It can be complicated, expensive, and time-consuming.
How do you avoid all of that? Well, there is no probate if there are no probatable assets. That is, there is nothing to distribute if you don’t own anything that needs distributing. Everything that you own that would normally have to be dealt with in a probate is instead held in a trust. In this kind of trust, you don’t lose any control over your property, and when you pass away, the trust has all the instructions for what to do without the need to go to a judge for permission.