Whether you're running a startup, managing a family business, or hold equity in a private company, trusts can protect and transfer business interests that could be vital for their long-term success. Here is a helpful article that outlines more details: What to Know About Putting Your Business in a Trust
When considering adding your business to your Trust or Will, it’s important to take into account variables such as ownership type, operating/contractual agreements, share transfer restrictions, and state-specific corporate filings.
For this reason, and if you have questions about your specific business, we recommend consulting with an attorney. The "Consult an Attorney" feature is offered with your Wealth Membership, or you can opt to speak to an attorney of your choice independently.
Adding a Business to Your Trust
Within the Trust or Will workflows, you have the ability to fund your trust with your business or add it as an asset within your plan.
When you add a Family Business to your plan within the document workflow, you are creating language in your document that permits the transfer of your business to your trust in the future. This allows you to marshal your business and establish your intention to add it to your trust at a later time. It is recommended that you choose Family Business in the workflow to generate this language in your document and demonstrate your intent.
Please note that it is not necessary to include this clause in order to add your business to the trust later. You are not required to fund the trust with assets at this time or to include any specific language regarding this in the document. However, if you have established the LLC and wish to fund the trust with this asset and add language into the document regarding this asset, this will accomplish that.
Adding a Business within the document workflow to insert language
Click on the Distributing Assets panel and select the Trust Funding section
Here, you can select 'Start funding with other assets that I currently own'.
On the next page, you can select the account for a Privately Owned Business.
*If creating a Joint Trust: Make sure to select ownership accordingly here as wellAfter a couple of prompts, you will be able to create the asset card for the business by selecting 'Add Business' and entering the current owner
*Make sure ownership matches how you had selected it previously in the workflow when you check the box for the Privately Owned Business.This will accomplish adding the language into the trust document when the PDF is generated.
Once drafting is finalized, make sure to navigate to the Review Panel before exiting the workflow to review the data entered into the document, and the PDF is generated
