Should I Do Estate Planning for Our Family Cabin?

Should I do estate planning for my family cabin? My name is Andrew Ayers. I'm an attorney with offices in Minnesota. And today we're going to talk about that vacation home family cabin that's been in your family for years. And we want to make sure that it stays that way. So things are getting quiet here. It's July we're getting ready to go on our family vacation and I've been having a lot of colleges that clients who are in that same situation. They've got a family cabin, they're going to go to it's been in the family for years, and they want to make sure that they're protecting it. So this isn't as long as on my other videos. It's gonna be a short quick three things to think about and looking at doing estate planning for your family. First thing you want to do is make sure you're talking to the whole family. You don't want to create a plan. Two or three family members never even knew what was coming. They didn't even know what was going on. They wanted to be in the family gathering. Or the flip side of it. Maybe they didn't maybe they move far away too hard for them to get to the family. And they just weren't they didn't have an ownership interest. Maybe they just like to come visit sometimes. And that's step two, is make sure you plot out your plan for the future. Who's it going to what's going on? What's it gonna look like in the future who are going to be the owners what are going to be their different rules. And when the entire families had this discussion that can make the plan a lot simpler than simply mom and dad deciding here's what to do in the family cabin and rule that out the next year. We'll let the next generation sort out what's gonna happen. And so the third step is to create that plan and when you're creating the plan, from a legal standpoint, the most important question you have to figure out is how is the cabin going to be owned going forward? The first way is just probably like it is now direct ownership. Let's say mom and dad own it. They can use to transfer on death deed and have it automatically go to their children or mom and dad owner with their siblings, or their opening it with a biter, survivorship, meaning the last sibling to be alive in the cabin, or is it shared able to be passed out? So we can do direct ownership to pretty straightforward. We just want to make sure we know that that's what we want to do. Second way you can own that cabin is by using a trust. Now trust is going to be a little more advanced and it's going to have a lot more rigidity. It's going to have a structure to it and the trusts are going to detail what happens with the cabin and how we divide things up. But it will also make sure to keep that cabin out of the probate court so we're not going to have to worry about a court coming in and possibly selling the cabin on the third way, which is a common way my clients do it. I think it's a great way if you're renting out your property is to put the property into an LLC. So you're creating a business an LLC, that will be the owner of the property. The advantages of this are that eliminating any liability so if somebody rents the property from someone who is looking for a smooth, they're not swinging personal assets, they're assuming the LLC, and the assets of the LLC are usually going to be limited to the asset of the property that the LLC owns. Another benefit of the LLC is that you can protect your name and privacy. If that's something you're concerned about. You can take that rent that comes in and use that money to reinvest into the property without showing up on your tax return. And then of course, at the end of the day, it's a great way to this asset out of probate court. So rather than having individuals own this property when somebody dies, the probate court has distributed the LLC will have provisions about what happens when an LLC member dies, and what are the next steps. So you can just have that LLC membership being inherited from different members of the family, as opposed to having to go into the probate court if somebody dies. So I'm on vacation, hopefully you're seeing there's a few different issues you want to consider when you're creating estate planning regarding family count. It's not something you want to try to do yourself. As I said, you want to have a discussion with your whole family and make sure everyone's on the same page. If you're ready to get started if you have more questions, you can go to my website Andrew M ayers.com. There's a little red button that says legal strategy session like that. On my personal calendar, we'll set up a time for a legal strategy session which is usually 15 to 20 minutes. We've talked about your family cabin, nothing to do with it and create a plan for you going forward. You want to keep that family cabin is not something you want to try to do it yourself.