Estate planning documents and how lawyers are hired and paid to draft them, with Texas specifics
An executor generally files an inventory, appraisement, and list of claims within ninety days of qualifying. Where debts are limited to secured real estate loans, taxes, and administration costs, an affidavit in lieu of inventory can keep the asset list out of the public record.
A revocable trust controls only the assets retitled into its name. Accounts, minerals, and vehicles left in an individual name still pass under the pour-over will and still go through probate.
Each deed transferring real property into a trust must be recorded in the county where the land sits, and each county charges its own fee. Ask whether those recording charges are inside the quoted flat fee or billed on top.
A retired couple in Williamson County paid a flat fee at a hotel seminar for a revocable trust, a pour-over will, powers of attorney, and a binder with tabs. Two years later the husband died. The successor trustee opened the binder and found a deed transferring the homestead into the trust, recorded properly, and nothing else. The brokerage account, the two bank accounts, the mineral interests in Karnes County, and a certificate of deposit were all still titled in his individual name. The trust held one asset. Everything else had to go through the probate court the seminar promised they would avoid.
That outcome is common enough that it is worth understanding why the arithmetic works differently in Texas than it does in the states where the trust sales pitch was developed. The question is not whether a revocable trust is a good document. It is whether it does enough here, for this estate, to justify what it costs to build and to maintain.
Texas allows a will to name an independent executor and to waive bond. When that will is admitted, the court's role shrinks to a short hearing, the issuance of letters testamentary, and an inventory, appraisement, and list of claims filed within ninety days. Where there are no unpaid debts other than those secured by real property, taxes, and administration expenses, the executor may file an affidavit in lieu of inventory instead, keeping the asset list out of the public file. After that, the executor sells, pays, and distributes without asking permission. Before comparing anything to a trust, get a written estimate of what that probate would actually cost with the same attorney.
A trust that is not funded is a filing cabinet. The careful reader asks, in writing, exactly which transfers are inside the quoted fee: the deed on the homestead, deeds on rental or ranch property, the mineral deeds, assignment of LLC membership interests, retitling letters to each bank and brokerage, and the recording costs in each county. Ask who follows up when a bank refuses the first letter, because one usually does. Ask what happens in five years when a new account is opened. Ask whether the pour-over will exists precisely because funding is never complete, which it always does.
Two Texas checks belong on that list. Confirm the homestead exemption and any over-65 tax ceiling survive the transfer, which they do when the trust qualifies under the Tax Code, and confirm the mortgage servicer treats the transfer as protected from the due-on-sale clause under the federal Garn-St Germain provisions. Also confirm the character of community property is preserved, since sloppy trust drafting can convert community into something else and cost a surviving spouse the full step-up in basis. The IRS treats a revocable trust as a grantor trust during life, so no separate return is required while both settlors are living.
Land outside Texas is the clearest. A will admitted in Texas does not, by itself, pass Colorado acreage or an Arkansas hunting lease; an ancillary proceeding in that state is required, and its rules may be slower and more expensive than anything here. A trust holding the out-of-state deed removes that second probate entirely.
The second is a beneficiary who should not receive a check. A child with a substance problem, a disabled adult receiving means-tested benefits, or a son-in-law with creditors all argue for money held and paid out by a trustee under standards you write. That trust can be created inside a will instead, but a funded lifetime trust starts working the moment it is needed rather than after letters issue.
The third is privacy. A probated will becomes a public record, and anyone can read who got what. A trust instrument is not filed. The fourth is incapacity. A durable power of attorney is statutory and generally honored, but a successor trustee stepping in over titled trust assets meets less institutional resistance than an agent presenting a form a branch manager has not seen before, and either one, kept current, is what keeps a guardianship out of the picture.
Write down every asset with its title, then mark which would pass by beneficiary designation, by survivorship agreement, by transfer on death deed, or by the will. If what remains is a house and a bank account in one Texas county, independent administration is likely the cheaper path. If the list crosses state lines or names someone who needs a trustee, the trust is doing work no other document does, and the fee follows the work.
Transferring a Texas homestead into a qualifying revocable trust does not forfeit the residence homestead exemption or an over-65 tax ceiling. The trust language has to meet the Tax Code definition, so the appraisal district may ask for a copy.
Federal law protects a transfer of a residence into an inter vivos trust where the borrower remains a beneficiary and occupancy does not change. Notify the mortgage servicer anyway and keep the acknowledgment with the deed.
Careless trust drafting can convert community property into separate property or into a tenancy that costs the survivor the full basis adjustment at the first death. The instrument should state plainly that community property retains its character inside the trust.