You can make a trust without a lawyer, and for a simple estate it’s a reasonable project. A do-it-yourself revocable living trust built through an online platform or legal software typically runs $50 to $1,000, compared with $1,500 to $5,000 or more for one an attorney drafts. The catch is that trusts touch tax law, property law, and beneficiary rules, and a trust that looks fine on paper can quietly fail if you miss a step after signing.
The DIY path is really designed for one kind of trust: a revocable living trust, where you’re the grantor, trustee, and beneficiary while you’re alive, with instructions for what happens when you die or can’t manage things yourself. You can change it, add assets, swap beneficiaries, or dissolve it at any time. Irrevocable trusts, which are used for asset protection, estate tax reduction, or special needs planning, are a different animal and not a good DIY candidate. Drafting mistakes there can’t be undone by tearing up the document.
The Steps to Create a Trust Yourself
Inventory Your Assets and Pick Your People
List what you want the trust to hold: real estate, bank accounts, investment accounts, and valuable personal property. For each one, note how it’s currently titled, because you’ll be changing that title later.
Then decide who fills each role. Name your beneficiaries, and name alternates in case a primary beneficiary dies before you do. Choose a successor trustee who takes over when you can’t serve anymore. That person needs to be someone you trust with money and who will actually do the administrative work.
Draft the Document
Online trust platforms and legal software run you through a questionnaire and generate the document from your answers. A valid trust generally requires the grantor’s clear intent to create it, identifiable trust property, and named beneficiaries. The document itself should cover what assets the trust holds, who the beneficiaries are, what powers the trustee has, when beneficiaries receive distributions, and what happens if a beneficiary or trustee can’t serve.
Sign It Properly
Execution rules vary by state. Most states require notarization. A handful require one or two witnesses at signing, and a few don’t strictly require notarization. Getting the trust both notarized and witnessed costs almost nothing extra and removes the risk that your state wants a formality you didn’t know about.
Fund the Trust
This is the step that makes or breaks a DIY trust, and the one people most often rush or skip. Until you retitle assets into the trust’s name, those assets will pass through probate as if the trust didn’t exist. An unfunded trust controls nothing.
Funding looks different depending on the asset:
- Real estate: prepare and record a new deed transferring ownership from your name to the trust. Recording fees typically run from about $10 to over $100 depending on the county.
- Bank and investment accounts: contact each institution to retitle the account. Most banks have standard forms and charge no fee, but it can take a few weeks.
- Vehicles: some states let you retitle a car into a trust; others make it impractical. Check your state’s DMV rules first.
- Life insurance and retirement accounts: these pass by beneficiary designation, not by title. You update the designation rather than retitling the account, and retirement accounts in particular have traps worth understanding before naming a trust as beneficiary.
Add a Pour-Over Will
No matter how carefully you fund the trust, something usually slips through: an account you forgot, an asset you bought after creating the trust, or a small inheritance you never retitled. Without a backup, those strays pass under your state’s default inheritance rules as if you had no estate plan at all.
A pour-over will names your trust as the beneficiary of anything not already in it, directing your executor to move those remaining assets into the trust after your death. Those assets still go through probate before reaching the trust, but at least they end up distributed according to your wishes rather than a state formula. Most online trust platforms include a pour-over will in the package. Skipping it is one of the more common DIY mistakes.
Taxes You Need to Know About
While you’re alive, a revocable trust is invisible for income tax purposes. The IRS treats the trust’s income as your income, and you report it on your personal return using your Social Security number. The trust doesn’t need its own tax ID and doesn’t file a separate return.1Internal Revenue Service. Trust Primer Nothing about your day-to-day taxes changes.
When you die, the trust becomes irrevocable and turns into a separate taxable entity. Your successor trustee has to apply for an Employer Identification Number, and the trust files its own return (Form 1041). Any income the trust keeps rather than distributes gets taxed at the trust’s own rates, which are punishing. For 2026, a trust hits the top 37% federal bracket at just $16,000 of taxable income.2Internal Revenue Service. Revenue Procedure 2025-32 An individual doesn’t reach that rate until well over $600,000. The trust also owes the 3.8% net investment income tax on undistributed investment income above that same $16,000 threshold.3Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 559, Net Investment Income Tax The practical takeaway for your successor trustee: distribute income to beneficiaries promptly, because beneficiaries almost always face a lower rate than the trust does.
Estate tax is a separate question and, for most DIY candidates, not the driver. The 2026 federal estate tax exemption is $15 million per person.4Internal Revenue Service. Whats New – Estate and Gift Tax If you’re anywhere close to that number, hire a lawyer.
When You Shouldn’t Do It Yourself
A simple revocable trust for a single person or married couple with ordinary assets and clear beneficiaries is a reasonable project. Several situations push past what templates can handle:
- Blended families. Balancing children from a prior relationship against a current spouse requires drafting that generic templates rarely handle well. The wrong structure can disinherit your children or leave your spouse short.
- Special needs beneficiaries. A trust for someone on Medicaid or Supplemental Security Income has to be drafted as a special needs trust with very specific provisions. Small errors can disqualify the beneficiary from benefits.
- Business interests. Moving an LLC, partnership interest, or closely held corporation into a trust involves operating agreements, buy-sell provisions, and tax elections that templates don’t address.
- Real estate in multiple states. Each state may have different rules for transferring property into a trust, and the trust may need to comply with each state’s law where it holds real estate.
- Significant retirement accounts. Under the SECURE Act, most non-spouse beneficiaries must empty an inherited retirement account within 10 years, with annual required minimum distributions along the way. When a trust is the named beneficiary, distributions can get trapped inside the trust and taxed at those compressed brackets instead of flowing to the beneficiary’s lower rate. A trust drafted before the SECURE Act may contain provisions that actively hurt beneficiaries under current rules.5Internal Revenue Service. Retirement Topics – Beneficiary
- Estates approaching $15 million, where trust design can mean six or seven figures in tax savings or losses.
The common thread: these situations involve trade-offs a template can’t evaluate. When the stakes involve government benefits, a child’s inheritance, or significant taxes, the $2,000 to $5,000 an attorney charges is cheap insurance.
Mistakes That Sink DIY Trusts
- Never funding the trust. The single most common failure. You sign the document, put it in a drawer, and never retitle a thing. Everything goes through probate anyway.
- Not updating after life changes. Marriage, divorce, a new child, or the death of a named beneficiary can make a trust outdated or harmful. A revocable trust is easy to amend, but only if you remember to do it.
- Skipping the pour-over will. Without one, assets left outside the trust fall under state default inheritance rules.
- Leaving the successor trustee in the dark. They need to know the trust exists, where the document is, and what it holds. They’ll also need to get an EIN, potentially file tax returns, and handle distributions.
- Using boilerplate for a non-boilerplate situation. Templates work when your situation matches their assumptions. Once something unusual enters the picture, the template can produce a trust that technically exists but doesn’t do what you need.
If you’ve already made a DIY trust and recognize any of these problems, a revocable trust can be amended at any time while you’re alive and competent. Fixing it now is far cheaper than your family untangling it later.