Willing your will and trusting your trust
My wife and I recently had the joyous opportunity to discuss in detail the logistics surrounding our—God forbid—untimely demise. We figured it’s about time we arranged our wills. Not for us—we’d be dead—but for our daughter, lest our vast, vast fortune get lost in a sea of probate. Our situation is not dissimilar to the one detailed on Downton Abbey , where the Earl of Grantham must ensure he has an heir to inherit his estate. Likewise we felt it necessary to mark down legally who will inherit things like my New York Yankees memorabilia and our printer-scanner-fax machine. In fact, a simple will would not suffice. No, we needed, apparently, a revocable testamentary trust. The cost of that was enough to make me wonder if one could inherit the trust itself. Of course, all of these hypothetical scenarios were prefaced with the phrase “God forbid.” I feel like that should be implied, but everyone involved, including myself, still finds it necessary to verbalize. Say, for example, you...