Estate & probate
Revocable trust
A revocable trust is an arrangement you create during your lifetime to hold your assets, which you can change or cancel at any time, and which continues to operate without court involvement after you die.
Also called living trust · revocable living trust
You create the trust, you are usually its trustee while you are able, and you remain the beneficiary during your lifetime. Nothing about your control or your taxes changes while you are alive and well. What changes is what happens next: assets already inside the trust do not need probate to move, and a successor trustee can act immediately if you become unable to.
That second point is the underrated one. A revocable trust is at least as valuable for incapacity as it is for death, because it gives somebody clear authority to manage your affairs without a court appointing them.
What it does not do
A revocable trust does not protect assets from creditors, and it does not reduce income or estate tax, because you kept the right to revoke it, the law still treats the assets as yours. Most importantly, it does nothing at all for assets that were never re-titled into it. An unfunded trust is a document, not a mechanism.
This entry is a general explanation, not advice for your situation, and it deliberately avoids thresholds and figures, because those are the part most likely to be out of date. Reviewed August 27, 2026. If a decision turns on any of it, ring the office rather than relying on a page.
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From definition to your situation
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