Change your living trust without redoing it

Usually two separate things, and people are often surprised it is not one. The judgment decides who owns the property, but it does not move it — the trust still holds title until a deed says otherwise, and the trust still names your former spouse until it is amended.

So the deed side needs a divorce transfer deed conveying the property out of the joint trust to you, referencing the judgment and claiming the dissolution exemption from transfer tax and reassessment — flat $325. The trust side needs the joint trust amended, restated, or wound up and replaced with an individual trust, depending on what the trust document itself allows.

Which of those is right is a legal question we cannot answer for you. Send us the judgment and the trust and we will tell you what the trust’s own amendment clause permits, so you can take that to an attorney or decide with clear information.

It depends on what your trust says, and this is where reading the document matters more than any general rule. Many joint trusts require both settlors to sign any amendment while both are living, which means you may not be able to remove your former spouse unilaterally, however clear the judgment is. Where that is the case, the practical route is often to revoke the joint trust as the trust itself permits and create a new individual trust, then deed your property into it.

Do not assume California law has already handled it. Some provisions in favour of a former spouse are affected by dissolution, but relying on that instead of amending leaves gaps — and an out-of-date trust is discovered by your successor trustee after your death, when nothing can be fixed. Send us the trust and we will tell you what its clause requires before you commit to either path.

Yes, and it is one of the more common amendments we prepare. People name a single successor when the children are young and later want two of them serving together, or want to add a professional alongside a family member. The amendment names the new successors and, importantly, states whether they must act together or may act independently — leaving that unsaid is what causes banks and title companies to stall later, because they cannot tell whose signature is sufficient.

If a successor trustee has already taken over, they will usually also need a certification of trust naming the current trustees before an institution will deal with them.

Yes, while the trust is revocable and you have capacity. An amendment can change who inherits, change the shares, add a beneficiary, remove one, or add conditions such as an age at which a share is distributed. Where the changes are extensive, a restatement is usually cleaner than stacking several amendments, because a successor trustee then reads one current document rather than piecing together the original and three amendments.

We prepare the amendment to the change you direct. We do not advise on whether a change is wise, how it affects the people involved, or whether it creates a risk of the trust being contested — those are questions for an attorney, and worth asking if you are disinheriting someone or treating children unequally.