QTIP IS USEFUL ESTATE PLANNING TOOL
During our current era a significant percentage of marriages end in divorce. Most of the people who do get divorced eventually remarry, and in the majority of these cases one or both of the individuals entering the marriage has children from a previous marriage or marriages.
This can present the need for some advanced estate planning techniques to be implemented. Even though you may trust your new spouse implicitly you really have no guarantees about how he or she will proceed after you pass away. For this reason you may want to take legal steps be absolutely certain that your children are provided for come what may.
This can be achieved by first entering into a prenuptial agreement that delineates the personal property of each individual entering the marriage. You could then create a qualified terminable interest property trust to provide for both your spouse and your children.
To provide a simple explanation, with these trusts your spouse can benefit from the assets placed in the trust throughout the rest of his or her life without having direct access to the principal (unless of course you make some access available when drawing up the trust).
However, your spouse has no control over who inherits the trust after his or her death. After your spouse passes away your named beneficiaries assume ownership of the resources that are remaining in the trust. These would presumably be your children.
If you are interested in the possibility of creating a qualified terminable interest property trust simply take a moment pick up the phone to arrange for a consultation with a good San Bernardino estate planning lawyer.