Gosh, in the back of my memory I seem to remember something in the trust paperwork that says things that we buy in our day to day lives automatically go into the trust. Like new TV sets, rifles, etc. I'm going to have to go back and look at our paperwork. It was about two years ago that we set this up, and already, I've forgotten some of the details!

Certain things have to be titled into the trust or owned by the trust - for example, we had to create new bank accounts that were owned by the trust and move our money into those accounts. Other things were specifically titled to the trust. Still other things, like some insurance policies have your spouse as primary beneficiary and the trust as secondary beneficiary.

But I do seem to remember some clause that put everyday purchases, including future ones, directly into the trust with no special handling/titling required. I've got to go look that up. Little details like that are important to know. Very important! I just asked my wife, and she said, yeah, she remembers something like that too. Maybe it was purchased items over some amount? So neither of us remember past the vague recollection that "there's something like that in there".

On my agenda for tomorrow - go find out FOR SURE! All this lawyer stuff is in a nice neat binder upstairs, and also electronic copies on thumbdrives that the lawyer gave us.

There are also some things the lawyer said to leave out of the trust. I think that included our older automobiles. Maybe because they are not worth that much, don't contribute significantly to the "outside the trust total" dollars that would require probate, thus not worth the effort to retitle them? There's a sheet of paper with all those explanations of why/why not in our binder. I'll check that too.

I do remember that out of state property owned will mandate probate in the state it's owned in, even if it's not worth much. We had some farm land in south Texas that we sold because of that. The only thing worthwhile there were the mineral rights (gas and oil is heavy down there). So we kept those mineral rights. I need to call the lawyer and see if out of state mineral rights will require probate. See, this thread has got me thinking about all kind of things I need to do! Thanks for starting it up Bingley! Although we have kind of deviated off from your original topic. Still, "stranded overseas" and "trusts" do go together, so it's not a total thread hijack.