Make your Oregon 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 Oregon.

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 Oregon 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 Oregon living trust

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

Proving your Oregon trust without handing it over

When a bank, brokerage, title company, insurer, or transfer agent asks to see your trust, Oregon law lets your trustee give them a short certification of trust instead (Or. Rev. Stat. §130.860). 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 Oregon 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

Oregon recognizes tenancy by the entirety (Real property only, and by default rather than by election: ORS §93.180(1)(b) provides that a conveyance or devise of real property, or of an interest in real property, to spouses married to each other creates a tenancy by the entirety unless the conveyance or devise clearly and expressly declares otherwise. The same section makes a conveyance to two or more other persons a tenancy in common unless it clearly and expressly declares a right of survivorship, and abolishes joint tenancy in real property except where the conveyance or devise runs to a trustee or a personal representative. Nothing in the section reaches personal property, and nothing in it addresses the rights of a creditor of one spouse.). 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 Oregon 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 Oregon real estate into the trust

To transfer Oregon 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 Clerk of the county where the property is located. The trust does not control real estate unless the deed transfer is recorded.