Answered directly, then qualified.

Most families at or near retirement need both, and the trust is the one that does the work people are usually hoping for. A will directs what you own in your own name and does so through probate; a revocable trust holds assets outside probate and gives somebody authority immediately if you become unable to act. If you are choosing where to spend effort, the trust, and actually funding it, matters more.

Start with revocable. It handles probate avoidance, privacy and incapacity, and you keep complete control, which is what almost everybody actually wants. Consider irrevocable only for a specific job that revocable cannot do: protecting assets from future claims, moving value out of your taxable estate, or planning around long-term care rules. Those jobs are real, they are legal questions, and the wrong structure is worse than none.

Your accountant prepares returns: accurate, on time, backward-looking. Tax planning decides what happens next: conversions, asset location, the order you draw from accounts, which year to realize what. Preparation has a filing deadline that guarantees it gets done. Planning has none, which is exactly why almost nobody does it. You need both, and the second one is the one currently missing.

A good financial advisor manages your investments well and may coordinate loosely with your other professionals. A family office holds the disciplines itself (law, tax, insurance and investment), so the estate plan, the tax plan and the portfolio are decided against each other rather than in four separate rooms. If your advisor does not touch your tax return or your estate documents, then two of the four have nobody accountable for them, and the failures that cost families most sit precisely in those joins.

Traditional wins if your tax rate when the money comes out is lower than it is going in. Roth wins if it is higher. Since nobody knows future rates, the durable answer is to hold both and control which one you draw from each year. That flexibility is worth more than getting the original bet right. If everything you have is traditional, you have no lever at all, and that is the most common position at retirement.

Self-funding works if your assets could absorb years of care without wrecking the surviving spouse’s income, and if you would actually be willing to spend them that way. Insuring makes sense when the cost of care would consume the plan, or when you want the money protected for a specific purpose. The genuine deciding factor is not preference: it is whether the plan survives the expense, which is a modeling question nobody has probably run for you.

Probate is court-supervised, public, and runs on the court’s timetable. Trust administration is private, handled by your trustee, and starts immediately. Neither is a disaster and both get there in the end, but if you are weighing whether funding a trust is worth the effort, this is the comparison that answers it, because this is the part your family experiences.

Fee-only firms are paid solely by their clients. Fee-based firms charge client fees and may also receive commissions, usually on insurance. Neither is disqualifying and both contain good and bad practitioners. What matters is whether a firm will tell you, unprompted and before you decide, how it is paid on the specific thing it is recommending, which is a question you can ask either kind and judge by the answer.