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There may well be events which require you to amend your Living Trust Agreement. The most common reasons why you might want to amend your Living Trust include:-

1. a change in your marital status;
2. a move to another state;
3. you adopt or have a new child;
4. your child becomes an adult;
5. a material change to your financial position or the value of your trust assets;
6. a major change in tax law;
7. one of your beneficiaries passes away;
8. you wish to add a new beneficiary or change existing beneficiaries; or
9. one of your trustees dies or is unable or unwilling to serve.

If any of the above events occur, or indeed any other event which is unlisted, you may wish to change the terms of your Living Trust.

The process of amending a Living Trust is quite straight forward. All you need to do is complete a Living Trust Amendment Agreement. Similar to the Living Trust Agreement, the Amendment Agreement will be between you as grantor and you as trustee of your Living Trust. The Amendment Agreement will set out the precise amendments that you want made to your Living Trust Agreement. In many cases, you will simply want to change the name of a beneficiary, make a new gift of an asset, or delete an existing gift. This is usually done by providing for the deletion of words or sentences and, in some cases, the replacement of those words or sentences with new ones. The Amendment Agreement will simply set out what these changes are. For example, it may simply say that “The words “John Smith” in clause 7.1 are hereby deleted and replaced with the words “Jack Jones”.

While there is no strict requirement to have an amendment agreement notarized, we do recommend that you have it notarized where it affects the distribution of real estate under your Living Trust.

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