Make your Indiana living trust.

How it works

1. 1

   Answer a few questions

   About your assets, trustees, and beneficiaries.

2. 2

   Download your trust

   A complete, personalized revocable living trust, formatted for Indiana.

3. 3

   Sign and fund

   Sign the trust. Fund it by transferring assets into its name (notarization strongly recommended if real estate is involved).

Joint or individual

Married couples can make one joint Indiana living trust that both spouses sign, in place of an individual one. The questionnaire asks which you want, and Will.com generates either.

Signing a Indiana living trust

Indiana does not require witnesses or a notary for your trust to be valid (Ind. Code §30-4-2-1). The trust is enforceable once its written terms carry your signature. Notarizing is still worth doing, because you will need an acknowledged signature to record a deed moving real estate into the trust.

Proving your Indiana trust without handing it over

When a bank, brokerage, title company, insurer, or transfer agent asks to see your trust, Indiana law lets your trustee give them a short certification of trust instead (Ind. Code §30-4-4-5). It states that the trust exists, who the trustee is, and what the trustee may do. It leaves out who inherits and what each person receives, so your beneficiaries stay private.

Will.com generates the Indiana Certification of Trust alongside your trust, built to the contents that section requires. Sign it in front of the same notary, at the same sitting as the trust, then give out copies of the certification rather than the trust itself.

Tenancy by the entirety

Indiana recognizes tenancy by the entirety. It's a form of co-ownership available only to married couples. Neither spouse can convey or encumber the property acting alone, and at the first death it passes to the surviving spouse by survivorship, outside probate. Whether it also puts the property beyond the reach of a creditor of one spouse alone is a separate question the states answer differently, so confirm what the tenancy does in Indiana before relying on it as creditor protection. When you transfer such property into a revocable trust, you may lose whatever entireties protection it carries unless your trust is drafted to preserve it.

Funding Indiana real estate into the trust

To transfer Indiana real estate into your trust, you sign a new deed conveying the property from yourself to yourself as trustee, then record the deed with the County Recorder of the county where the property is located (Ind. Code §32-21-4-1(b)). The trust does not control real estate unless the deed transfer is recorded.