A trust decides who holds title and who receives what, on your schedule instead of a court's. These are the example setups families and operators review with counsel. We help you get oriented. Your attorney drafts the documents that fit your facts.
Without a plan, heirs receive money in their own name and can spend all of it. With a trust, the money lands inside a system and the trustee follows the rules you wrote: how much, when, and under what conditions. That is the whole point of planning ahead.
A lump sum arrives in someone's personal name. You lose the lever on timing and purpose, and the business has to scramble on day one.
Capital lands in the trust. Operations keep running under the managers already named. Family gets support on a schedule, not a free-for-all.
For couples and families, a revocable living trust is usually the cleanest place to begin. You keep control and can change it while you are alive. If you cannot act, the successor trustee you named steps in. A fuller holding structure comes later, after the trust exists and is funded with counsel.
A trust that holds nothing does not help anyone. Funding it is the step people skip, and it is the reason plans fail quietly years later. This is the list, whichever structure you pick.
This is the one most often found wrong. A policy owned by or payable to the trust means the death benefit lands inside the plan, on the schedule you wrote, instead of arriving as a personal check someone can spend freely.
Owning the policy and being named as beneficiary are not the same thing, and they carry different tax and protection outcomes. Your attorney sets both, and a licensed partner places the policy.
Credit belongs with the company that borrows, and the trust owns that company. Keeping the borrowing in the business name keeps it off your personal file and keeps the ownership line inside the plan.
Underwriting still looks at the business, and often still asks for a personal guarantee. Moving a line is a lender conversation as much as a legal one.
Membership interests in your LLCs, usually held through a holding company. The business keeps operating under the managers named in its own agreements. What changed is the ownership line above it.
Your home and any rentals get retitled with counsel directing each step. Property in a second state is worth raising early, because it is the usual reason a family ends up in two court processes.
Bank, brokerage, and store-of-value holdings. Each has its own funding step, and a trust that holds nothing does not help anyone.
Retirement accounts are the exception and usually stay in your name with beneficiaries aligned to the plan. Ask counsel before moving one.
These are menus, not prescriptions. Pick the one closest to your life, then refine it on a structure call. Your attorney customizes the entities, the trust terms, and the funding steps.
Multi-generation stack for families planning past their own lifetime.
Keeps intellectual property and real estate in separate boxes under one plan.
Risk separation and key-person continuity for active businesses.
Clean sleeves for capital, property and reserves.
No structure is best without your facts. These four are illustrative menus from WealthGrid Management LLC. Counsel drafts the entities, the trust terms and the funding steps, and a licensed partner places any coverage.
Ownership is one picture. Cash is a second one, and the decks keep them apart so the two ideas do not blur. Profit and rent collect in the holding company, the trust decides what happens next, and what is not distributed stays inside and keeps working.
Family gets support on the schedule written into the document: how much, when, and under what conditions. Paced, rather than handed over on one date.
What stays inside remains subject to the trust terms and can keep working. That is the difference between a plan that ends with one generation and one that does not.
This shows where cash goes, not what it earns. No return, income level, or tax outcome is promised. What a trustee may do with trust capital depends on your document, state law, and your advisors.
You have probably heard the phrase. Here is what it actually describes. Title sits in the trust and you manage as trustee, so your name is not on that ownership line. The slogan is memorable. The legal design behind it is careful, and it is not something to attempt alone.
Title and membership interests sit in the trust, often through a holding company. You are not the personal owner on that line.
You take one seat, trustee, and run the trust under the document. A third party creates and settles it.
Who settles the trust, who serves as trustee, who benefits and which powers exist will make or break the design. The wrong mix of roles collapses it. An attorney and a CPA are required, and tax character depends on the powers written into the document.
A common teaching stack: leave family money through life coverage, name the irrevocable trust as the beneficiary, then hold and invest that cash in the trust's name and design the distributions. The same stack can start earlier if you fund the trust while you are living.
This is a teaching stack, not a WealthGrid return, recommendation or projection. Product choice is a licensed conversation, yields move, dividends are not guaranteed, and what the trustee may do with trust capital depends on the document, state law and your advisors.
Most people only ever hear about the death benefit. With a permanent design the policy also builds cash value you can borrow against while you are alive, without selling the asset, and the policy still pays the trust when the claim comes. Term insurance builds no cash value, so none of this applies to it.
You are borrowing against your own policy. Interest accrues, and anything left unpaid reduces what your family receives. It is a tool with a cost, not free money.
How much you can access, and when, depends on the policy, the design and the carrier. Product choice is a licensed conversation, and a licensed partner places the policy.
Only permanent designs build cash value. Term does not. Nothing here is a promise of access, growth, or a tax outcome, and none of it is investment or insurance advice.
Most plans stop at one claim: the money pays out, the family divides it, and that is the end of it. The version wealthy families are known for does something else. The trust holds coverage on more than one member, the claim pays the trust rather than a person, and the trustee can put it back to work, including on coverage for the generation coming up behind.
If a person owns the policy and a person is the beneficiary, the money lands in someone's name and the cycle continues only if they choose to continue it. With the trust as owner and beneficiary, the document decides, every time.
The mechanism does not care how large the first policy is. A modest one, funded consistently, starts the same cycle. Scale is a detail. The discipline is the strategy.
A death benefit is generally not subject to income tax, but whether it sits outside your taxable estate depends on who owns the policy, which is the whole reason the trust owns it rather than you. Nobody can promise a tax outcome decades ahead, tax law changes, and this has to be designed for your facts by an attorney and a CPA. It also only works if premiums keep being paid for decades, by people who did not set it up, and insurability is never guaranteed.
A sober sequence from a conversation to a funded structure. Quotes follow a structure discussion. We do not invent a fee before we understand what you need.
We orient you to the example architectures and answer questions.
The facts counsel needs before drafting anything.
Scope becomes a number only after the structure is understood.
Your attorney drafts and customizes the language you sign.
Retitle assets and align beneficiary designations with counsel.
Holding layers come after the trust exists and is funded.
Orient you to the example architectures, coordinate your checklist in the portal, and help you arrive at counsel prepared. This is education, not the practice of law.
Your attorney drafts and customizes the trust language. Your CPA weighs the tax facts. Nothing on this page replaces that work.
Members answer a short structure intake in the portal, browse every example as a live diagram, and take a chosen direction into the structure call.
Start your structure intake →Educational materials from WealthGrid Management LLC. Not legal, tax, or investment advice. No returns, performance guarantees, or tax-free claims. Any illustrative math is classroom-style only and is not a WealthGrid return. No fees are invented here. Quotes follow a structure discussion. An attorney and a CPA are required before you rely on any structure. Life coverage is offered through a licensed partner, not as a WealthGrid product guarantee.