An Unfunded Trust Is an Empty Safe
Trust funding is the work of moving your assets into your trust: retitling accounts, recording deeds, and updating beneficiary designations. If that work never happens, your trust controls nothing, and the assets left outside it still go through probate.
What Funding Actually Involves
Signing a trust creates the container. Funding fills it. For a typical Michigan family, that means:
- Real estate: a new deed for each property, recorded with the Register of Deeds, with the Property Transfer Affidavit (Form L-4260) filed within 45 days.
- Bank accounts: retitling checking, savings, and CDs into the trust (or naming the trust as beneficiary).
- Brokerage accounts: retitling non-retirement investment accounts into the trust.
- Retirement accounts and life insurance: updating beneficiary designations so they coordinate with the trust. These accounts are never retitled; getting the designations right is the whole job.
Each institution has its own forms, its own process, and its own way of losing your paperwork. That is exactly why so many trusts never get funded.
Worried about your house? Transferring your Michigan home into a revocable trust does not uncap your property taxes or affect your Principal Residence Exemption (MCL 211.27a(7)(a)), and it does not trigger your mortgage's due-on-sale clause (the federal Garn-St. Germain Act protects transfers to your own living trust).
How Harbor Law Is Different
Most attorneys hand you a beautiful binder and a to-do list, and the funding becomes your homework. Industry studies and probate courts see the result every year: trusts that were signed but never funded, and families in probate anyway.
Harbor Law finishes the job. Every trust-based plan includes a written, institution-specific funding roadmap. And with the Concierge Trust Plan ($3,500), we do the funding for you: we prepare and submit the paperwork, get on the phone with your banks, coordinate directly with your financial advisor, and record your deeds.
The engagement ends with a funding confirmation letter: a written statement that every asset we identified together is confirmed in the trust. You do not wonder whether it worked. You have it in writing.
The typical experience
Sign the trust, take the binder home, receive a to-do list, and hope you get to it. Years later, the trust owns nothing.
The Harbor Law experience
Sign the trust, then we fund it: deeds recorded, accounts retitled, beneficiaries updated, and a confirmation letter when it is done.
Already Have a Trust?
We offer a free review call for existing trusts. The two problems we find most often: the trust was never funded (the house or accounts were never retitled), and IRA or 401(k) beneficiary designations that are outdated or contradict the plan. Both are fixable, and both are far cheaper to fix now than in probate later.
Bring your trust binder, or just your questions. We will tell you plainly whether anything needs attention.
Schedule a Free Trust ReviewA Trust That Actually Works
Get a plan that is finished, funded, and confirmed in writing.
Schedule a Free Consultation