Make your Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts.

3. 3

   Sign and fund

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

Signing a Massachusetts living trust

No formal execution requirements beyond settlor signature; notarization strongly recommended when funding real property

Proving your Massachusetts trust without handing it over

When a bank, brokerage, title company, insurer, or transfer agent asks to see your trust, Massachusetts law lets your trustee give them a short certification of trust instead (M.G.L. c. 203E §1013). 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 Massachusetts 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

Massachusetts 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. Under Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 209, §1, property held that way is also beyond the reach of a creditor of one spouse alone while both spouses are living. 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 Massachusetts real estate into the trust

To transfer Massachusetts 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 Registry of Deeds for the county or district where the property is located (several Massachusetts counties are split into registry districts, and the deed must go to the district that covers the land). The trust does not control real estate unless the deed transfer is recorded.