Make your Michigan 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 Michigan.

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 Michigan 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 Michigan living trust

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

Proving your Michigan trust without handing it over

When a bank, brokerage, title company, insurer, or transfer agent asks to see your trust, Michigan law lets your trustee give them a short certification of trust instead (MCL §700.7913). 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 Michigan 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

Michigan recognizes tenancy by the entirety (Real property, and the bonds, certificates of stock, mortgages, promissory notes, debentures, or other evidences of indebtedness that Mich. Comp. Laws §557.151 describes: §600.6023a names both classes as property held jointly by a husband and wife as a tenancy by the entirety, and §557.151 provides that such evidences of indebtedness made payable to persons who are husband and wife are held by them in the same manner and subject to the same restrictions, consequences and conditions as real estate held jointly by husband and wife, with full right of ownership by survivorship, unless the instrument expressly provides otherwise). 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 Mich. Comp. Laws §600.6023a, 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 Michigan real estate into the trust

To transfer Michigan 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 Register of Deeds of each county where the property is located. The trust does not control real estate unless the deed transfer is recorded.