In general, if the changes are minor, such as 1) adding or deleting specific bequests, 2) changing who will serve as successor trustee, or 3) updating a beneficiary’s or the successor trustee’s legal name due to marriage or divorce, then a simple trust amendment will be sufficient. There really aren’t any established written rules as to when a restatement is necessary. On the other hand, a complete restatement should be taken into consideration if the changes the trust maker wants to make are significant, such as 1) adding a new spouse as a beneficiary, 2) completely cutting out a beneficiary, or 3) switching from distributions to family members to distributions to a charity (or vice versa).
In addition, think about combining all of your changes into a full restatement if you’ve made a series of three or four basic trust adjustments over the years and you now want to make another change. Your future trustee would benefit from this since they would only have to follow one document rather than having to put together the clauses of four or five different documents.
Finally, if the laws regulating revocable living trusts in your state have changed, you should update your living trust document to conform to the new regulations.
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