THE LIVING TRUST PLAYBOOK: How to Decide, Design, Fund, Maintain, and Pass On Your Estate Without Leaving Your Family a Mess (The Financial Planning Series)

A living trust can be one of the most useful tools in an estate plan—but simply signing a trust document doesn't mean your estate plan is finished.

Your home, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, life insurance, bank accounts, beneficiary designations, and other assets may all follow different rules when you die or become incapacitated. If those pieces don't work together, your family may face unnecessary confusion, delays, expenses, or unintended outcomes.

The Living Trust Playbook gives you a practical, step-by-step roadmap to understand, build, fund, coordinate, and maintain a living trust—without getting lost in complicated legal jargon.

• How Living Trusts Really Work – Understand what a revocable living trust can—and cannot—do for you, your family, and your estate.
• The Trust Decision Framework – Determine whether a living trust makes sense for your situation, and understand when a simpler will-based plan may be appropriate.
• The 3-Bucket Asset Map – Learn a simple way to classify your assets into Trust-Owned Assets, Beneficiary-Designated Assets, and Other Transfer Methods so you can see how your entire estate fits together.
• How to Properly Fund Your Trust – Understand why signing the trust is only the beginning and how to identify the assets that may need to be transferred or coordinated.
• How to Coordinate Your Estate Plan – Bring your trust, will, beneficiary designations, powers of attorney, property ownership, and other transfer methods into one coordinated plan.
• How to Plan for Incapacity – Understand the roles of successor trustees, powers of attorney, and other important documents before your family needs them.
• Retirement Accounts & Beneficiary Designations – Learn why retirement accounts and other beneficiary-designated assets require special attention and why your trust does not automatically control them.
• Real-World Scenarios & Common Mistakes – See how seemingly small oversights—such as an unfunded trust or outdated beneficiary designation—can undermine an otherwise well-designed estate plan.
• How to Keep Your Plan Current – Use a practical annual review process to account for changes in your family, finances, assets, beneficiaries, and estate-planning documents.

Get practical worksheets, checklists, and planning tools designed to help you put the concepts from the book into action, including:

• 3-Bucket Asset Map™ Worksheet
• Estate Document Inventory
• Trust Funding Worksheet
• Master Funding Checklist
• Beneficiary Alignment Audit
• Successor Trustee Information Sheet
• Annual Trust Checkup

Whether you're considering a living trust for the first time or already have one sitting in a filing cabinet, The Living Trust Playbook helps you move from simply having estate-planning documents to having a coordinated estate plan that is easier for your family to understand and administer.

Plan today. Coordinate your estate. Give your family a clearer path forward.