What is a Pour-Over Will?
A “Pour-Over Will” is a Will that is designed to distribute any assets passing through your estate (through the probate court) into your Trust. In other words, a Pour-Over Will ensures that anything that falls through the cracks and is not held in trust or designated to be transferred to your trust upon your death is ultimately poured into your trust (hence the term “pour-over”).
But why do I need a Pour-Over Will?
A Pour-Over Will is only applicable if you have a trust in place - put differently, when clients come to me looking to do a standard revocable living trust (either a joint revocable trust for a married couple, separate trusts for each spouse, or a single person’s revocable trust) then it is a best practice to still complete a Pour-Over Will for that client because there is always a possibility that something may have been missed, forgotten, or perhaps the client meant to update an asset’s title at some point, but then life happened and they never got around to it.
Here are a couple examples:
You inherited property from your parents or a sibling, but never re-titled the asset into the name of your trust.
You forgot to update the beneficiary designation on your brokerage account or life insurance policy to name your trust as the transfer on death (“TOD”) beneficiary and/or pay on death (“POD”) beneficiary.
In both of the above examples (assuming there wasn’t a joint owner on the property and no backup death beneficiary on your financial accounts/life insurance) then such assets would pass through Probate (the scary place). Since such assets would then go through probate, you will then need to rely upon your Pour-Over Will (which gets submitted to the probate court) to make sure the assets get into your trust to make sure your wishes/intentions (as provided for in your trust in more detail) are fulfilled and followed appropriately.
Generally, a Pour-Over Will should be written to be consistent with your Trust so you will want to make sure that certain provisions (like your estate tax provisions and decision-making/communication between the Personal Representative appointed under your Will and your successor Trustee appointed through your Trust) align with one another.
If you have a Will already in place, but are looking to now add a Trust to your estate plan, then give me a call at 781 202 6368, email jlento@perennialtrust.com, or click here to schedule your free personal consultation.
I’m always happy to help,
Joseph M. Lento, J.D.
Your Local Estate Planning Attorney
For client testimonials, please visit: www.PerennialEstatePlanning.com
Conveniently located at 477 Main Street, Stoneham, MA 02180
