Make your New Jersey 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 New Jersey.

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 New Jersey 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 New Jersey living trust

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

Proving your New Jersey trust without handing it over

When a bank, brokerage, title company, insurer, or transfer agent asks to see your trust, New Jersey law lets your trustee give them a short certification of trust instead (N.J. Stat. §3B:31-81). 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 New Jersey 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

New Jersey 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 New Jersey 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 New Jersey real estate into the trust

To transfer New Jersey 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 Recording Office of the county where the property is located (that office is the Register of Deeds and Mortgages in the counties that have one and the County Clerk in every other county; N.J. Stat. §§46:1-1, 46:26A-6). The trust does not control real estate unless the deed transfer is recorded.