 When most of you created a living trust, the estate planning attorney prepared the deeds to any real property you owned. She or he went over the proper titling of assets and also went over what assets you should add to your trust and how to do that. After you left that meeting, the problem is so many of you stopped after you've put the house in the trust. You've neglected to put other things in the trust that should have been added, like bank accounts, life insurance, and other trust assets. So what happens if you've forgotten to add assets to your trust? Well, usually I can catch those mistakes at our estate planning review meetings. I go over the assets with a client, find out why assets have been omitted, teach them how to retitle those and put them in the trust, and that's no problem. The real problem occurs if someone is incapacitated or has passed away. That's where the real attorney work comes in. There are usually several options available to get omitted or left out assets into the trust and under the control of the backup trustee. Our first choice is for our office to use the incapacitated person's durable power of attorney for property. If that's up to date, it's usually fairly simple to work with the trustee to add omitted assets into the trust where they should have been at first. If there is no durable power of attorney or that durable power of attorney is inadequate or out of date, then our office will petition the court to approve the transfers of omitted assets into the trust. Where it becomes more difficult and expensive is if a person has passed away and there are important omitted assets that should have been a part of their trust. Let me give you some representative examples. If the only omitted asset does not involve any real property and all omitted assets add up to under $150,000, our office can prepare what's known as a $13100 petition or also known as a small estate affidavit. This is a non-court affidavit that permits small estate assets to be transferred free of any court proceedings into a person's living trust. This document can save hassles and money. In cases involving any real property or assets totaling above the $150,000 threshold, in California we generally have two options. One is a probate using the poor over will that is associated with the person's living trust. Or two, we can petition the court through a Higgs dead petition. Both options involve the superior court. Both involve time and expense, but one of these two options can usually ensure that all omitted assets are added to a trust once a settler dies or a trustee dies. The key is prevention. With regular estate planning review appointments and the advice of your estate planning attorney, there's a good chance that there'll be no omitted assets in your estate plan. And that's a good thing. If you're unsure, please call your estate planning attorney for a review appointment or call this office. I'm estate planning attorney, Hollis Logue.