LLCs and Trust Funding

For clients with some types of assets, we frequently encounter questions about LLCs and trust funding. Should your trust be a “member” of each limited liability company, or should the LLC manager be a trustee? Do you need to change your LLC operating agreement? How do you get these interests into your trust’s name? Not every estate planning client needs to worry about this issue. But those with rental real estate, for instance, might have already set up LLCs to hold those investment properties. They might even have established a separate LLC for each property. They wonder if they need to make changes to each LLC operating agreement, or rearrange the LLCs’ ownership interests. In this week’s podcast we discuss the interrelationship of LLCs and trust funding. We describe some of the choices, and the usual approaches we consider. Spoiler alert: as is so often the case with legal questions, the answer begins with “it depends.”