But, maybe they get sued and all a lawyer has to do to see whether they’re worth suing is to type their name into the county website, and up comes every bit of real estate they own. If they own something, the lawyer sees them as a valuable target, and he is motivated to proceed with the lawsuit.

Another expensive problem is the death of the owners. When one spouse dies, it is fairly simple for the survivor to have the other’s name taken off of the title (but even this will be unnecessary with what I’m about to show you). But when the widow or widower dies and wants to leave assets to the children, it’s not so easy. You have to get a lawyer to go through a looong and expensive probate case. The heirs can’t sell the house until a judge signs off on their inheritance. Lawyers love it.

• Secrecy of ownership. It’s no one’s business what property you own, and land trusts are the best way to keep your name out of the public record. This makes you less likely to be sued.
• Easy transfer of ownership. If, for whatever reason, you want to give or sell part of your property to someone else, you can do it without filing deeds with the county, or paying the transfer tax.
• This does NOT require a taxpayer ID or bank account or tax returns for the trust. It is a pass-through entity that is disregarded by the IRS. It is simply a way to hold title.
• This is an easy way to hold real estate with multiple partners. Rather than having to put multiple people or business names on a deed, you just put the trust name on the deed, and the partners’ names go on the trust documents stored in your filing cabinet or hard drive.
• It might be intimidating if you’ve never heard of this before, but once you get it, it’s easy!
• The biggest advantage is that you can completely avoid probate.

My dad and I owned some rentals that were each in their own trust. When he died in 2010, it was an expensive probate with cars, bank accounts, brokerage accounts, etc. (and he was just a regular, middle-class guy). I told the probate lawyer that all the real estate is in a trust, and they never mentioned it again. A trust is like lawyer repellant! Those land trusts saved us HUNDREDS in lawyer fees. If my dad had owned everything in a trust, we would never have even needed to go to an attorney at all.

Obviously, there are tremendous advantages to land trusts. But what are the disadvantages?

• Some lenders won’t lend money on real estate in a land trust. If that is the case, you can deed the property back into your name, sign the loan documents, and then deed the property back into the land trust. Recording a deed in Colorado costs $13—not a big deal.
• Some of the words that people use with trusts are intimidating at first, but the learning curve is very short, and we’ll teach you everything you need to know.
• It can cost you hundreds of dollars to hire a lawyer, and pay for the documents you need to start a trust. This is the biggest obstacle people face when looking into using a trust. But this is where we come in. For a fraction of the cost of a lawyer, we will provide all the documents and instructions you need.

Trusts are one of the tools that wealthy people use to preserve their money and make money. They know something most people don’t.

One of the things that we think of when we hear about trusts is wealthy people and trust fund babies. Sometimes trust fund babies are the butt of jokes. One way to use trusts is to make sure our nest egg passes on to our children without a bunch of money-grubbing attorneys taking their whack at it.

That is what we do for regular people—give them the tools of the wealthy—trusts, so they can become wealthy. Thin people behave like thin people. Wealthy people behave like wealthy people. Fat people who start behaving like thin people will eventually be thin. Regular people who behave like wealthy people will one day be wealthy. If you start using the tools wealthy people use, and behaving like a wealthy person behaves, you will one day be wealthy.

Even if you’re not interested in becoming wealthy, you can still use trusts to make your life easier and save your family money. That is what trusts do. As a real estate investor, who has used trusts dozens of times, I can vouch for the fact that trusts make my day-to-day life easier.