Submitted by Christopher S. Nudo on
Hello, my name is Anthony Davis. I'm an attorney that works with Christopher Nuta. We have offices in Rolling Meadows and Elgin, and our focus is estate planning, probate, real estate, as well as commercial law. Today what I wanna talk to you about is, I would say about once a month I have a client that comes on in that wants to avoid going through probate by adding a loved one onto their property deed. So just to give a simple example, let's say that I have a mother and she has a son. She's heard bad things about probate. She's heard that it takes about a year for probate to be concluded. She hears the costs associated with it, about 5,000 to 7,500 in legal fees.
She says, I don't want to have my son go through this. I just want to have my property be efficiently transferred to him. So the solution that she wants to explore is having me draft a quick claim deed that adds her son onto the property deed, and he'll gain a 50% interest upon her passing then very efficiently, her son will gain a 100% interest in the property.
The issues that we run into with this, and I would say I have about once a month somebody come in that has this problem that's done this. Let's say that our mother goes forward and sets up this quick claim deed. If at any point in the future she wants to take her son off of that quick claim deed and restore that a hundred percent interest in the property to her, it's not so easy. In order for her to do that, there has to be a new quick claim deed that's drafted and in addition, the son has to sign off on that. And if he's not interested in doing that, well, there's not really a lot that can be done to resolve that issue, so that's problem one.
Problem two is, you have to remember is that son now has a 50% interest in that property. So what that means is that if he goes through a divorce, now that 50% interest is part of the divorce. So that's another problem. And then the third problem with going about and doing this is again, because he has a 50% interest, if he ever has creditors out there, and the creditors are looking to be satisfied through assets that he owns, that 50% interest is now part of his estate that a creditor can go after to satisfy any of his debts.
So those are three significant problems that we run into when, if clients go and want to set their estate up in that manner. It's much more efficient for them to consider a revocable living trust or basically any other vehicle, at least in my opinion, rather than going through and trying to set the estate up in that way.
But if you have any questions about this, feel free to give me a call. I'd love to hear from you. Take care and have a great day.
