Will.com / Living trust / Vermont
VT · Revocable Living Trust
Make your Vermont living trust.
Skip probate, keep your estate private, and stay in control while you're alive. Legally valid in Vermont. Free to create, or add secure online document storage with the $29/year subscription.
Vermont living trust requirements
Special notes for Vermont
- Vermont extends tenancy-by-the-entirety creditor protection to property the spouses held as tenants by the entirety and then conveyed to their jointly or separately held revocable or irrevocable trusts (14A V.S.A. §505(c), effective April 24, 2025). Five conditions all have to hold: the spouses are married to each other; the property is the spouses' property; the property is held in the trust or has been deeded back out to them as tenants by the entirety; if a single joint trust is used, that trust must be revocable by either spouse acting alone but amendable only by both spouses acting together; and either both spouses are current beneficiaries of one joint trust that holds the entire property, or each spouse is a current beneficiary of a separate trust and the two separate trusts together hold the entire property. The trust-held property then keeps the same immunity from the separate creditors of either spouse, and the same treatment under federal and state bankruptcy law, as if it had remained outside the trust as tenants by the entirety, unless the settlor or settlors who transferred it provided otherwise in writing. The immunity ends when a court dissolves the marriage.
How it works
- 1
Answer a few questions
About your assets, trustees, and beneficiaries.
- 2
Download your trust
A complete, personalized revocable living trust, formatted for Vermont.
- 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 Vermont 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 Vermont living trust
No formal execution requirements beyond settlor signature; notarization strongly recommended when funding real property
Proving your Vermont trust without handing it over
When a bank, brokerage, title company, insurer, or transfer agent asks to see your trust, Vermont law lets your trustee give them a short certification of trust instead (14A V.S.A. §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 Vermont 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
Vermont 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 Vermont 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 Vermont real estate into the trust
To transfer Vermont 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 Town Clerk of the town where the property is located. The trust does not control real estate unless the deed transfer is recorded.
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