Mportant Information About Your Revocable Living Trust (Page 5 of 10) in pdf

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Registered Stocks or Bonds

If you deal regularly with a stock broker, he or she should be able to help you handle the paper work so that you

can transfer stocks or bonds that are registered in your name into the name of the trust. However, if you do not

have a broker who can help you do this, or simply wish to handle these transfers yourself, please ask us to

provide you with forms to attach to the stock certificates to assign them to the trust.

As discussed in Part II, during your lifetime, all trust income will be reported directly on your personal income

tax return, and the trust will not file an income tax return. Therefore, you should use your own Social Security

Number as the trust’s “tax identification number” on the stock or bond powers.

For publicly traded stocks or bonds, your signature on the assignments will need to be guaranteed. Your bank or

brokerage firm can do that for you. A signature guarantee is not the same as a notary statement.

There may be buy-sell agreements or other restrictions on your right to transfer stocks or bonds, especially if the

company is “closely held.” If there are restrictions, it is often possible to obtain a waiver for a transfer to a

revocable living trust. If you are uncertain whether there are any transfer restrictions, or if you want our help in

asking for a waiver, please let us know.

Life Insurance

In addition to your revocable living trust, you may have created an irrevocable trust to own insurance on your

life and avoid estate taxation of the death benefit. Or, someone else, such as a child, may own insurance on your

life, again in order to avoid estate taxation of the death benefit. If you have an irrevocable insurance trust, or if

we have given you other instructions about your life insurance, this section does not apply to you. However, if

you do not have an irrevocable life insurance trust and we have not given you other instructions, then we

recommend that you make your life insurance payable to your revocable trust, as described below. (You should

understand, however, that making your insurance payable to your revocable trust does not remove the death

benefit from your estate for estate tax purposes. If you would like to discuss planning techniques that can be

used to avoid estate taxation of life insurance death benefits, please let us know.)

Except as discussed in the preceding paragraph, life insurance on your life should be made payable directly to

your revocable trust. You will need to obtain a new beneficiary designation form for each policy, from your

agent or the appropriate insurance company. The beneficiary should then be changed to:

The then acting trustee of the _____________________________ [name of your trust], dated

____________________, as amended.

An insurance company sometimes insists on using its own specialized format (which varies from company to

company) for identifying a trust that is named as beneficiary of a life insurance policy. That is all right, as long

as the trust is accurately identified. If your insurance company or agent wants to use different wording from that

Mportant Information About Your Revocable Living Trust Page 5