Basic Trust Drafting

The second edition of Basic Trust Drafting (formerly titled Trust Drafting for Paralegals) includes coverage of considerable updates to the relevant tax laws, as amended by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Basic Trust Drafting takes a practical look at a wide variety of problems and concerns faced by clients who solicit elder care and estate planning help. It concentrates on estate tax, Medicaid planning, and creditor protection issues, focusing on the solutions that trusts provide to many common problems. Examples inspired by real life cases are presented to ensure that the information presented is practical and useful. Actual trust provisions are presented as suggestions for how concepts in the text can be put into practice. The text does not delve deeply into the theory behind the applicable rules and does not exhaustively analyze the relevant statutes and cases. Instead, the text is designed to caution the student of what pitfalls to watch for when analyzing a client s case, and to provide a working understanding of the issues most likely to emerge in real life and the starting points for analyzing and solving those issues. Special attention is devoted to enabling the student to interweave common issues so that, to the extent possible, the client does not have to sacrifice one tax or Medicaid planning benefit for another.