Updated August 3, 2026. Quick answer: a trust only controls what is actually in it, and what is in it changes every year. Review it annually and after every major financial event — the trust that was fully funded when you signed it is partially funded now.
Why it drifts
Every new account opens in your own name. Every refinance may require taking the house out and putting it back. Inheritances arrive titled to you. Accounts get closed and replaced. None of that finds its way into the trust by itself.
The drift is invisible because nothing goes wrong until someone needs the trustee to act — and by then it is too late to fix.
The annual review
- List what you own. Accounts, property, vehicles, business interests, anything with a title.
- Mark how each one passes: in the trust, by beneficiary designation, jointly owned, or in your name alone.
- Anything in your own name alone is the finding. Either retitle it, give it a beneficiary designation, or decide deliberately to leave it — but decide.
- Check the beneficiary designations too. They override the trust for the accounts they cover, and they go stale after a divorce, a death or a job change.
- Confirm the successor trustee is still right and still willing.
The events that should trigger a review immediately
- Buying or refinancing property — refinancing often requires the house to come out of the trust, and it does not go back automatically
- Opening any new account, especially a rollover
- An inheritance
- A marriage, divorce or death in the family
- Moving to another state
- Selling a business or a significant asset
Keep the record with the documents
The schedule of trust property is only useful if the person who will need it can find it. Keep it with the trust document, dated, and tell the successor trustee where it is. A perfectly maintained list nobody can locate is the same as no list.
This is fifteen minutes a year. It is the difference between a trust that works and an expensive folder — which is the failure this whole section exists to prevent.
Related: funding the trust · retitling accounts · the safety net.
General information drawn from federal and state statute, not legal advice. Deeds, trust law and recording requirements are STATE law and differ; a deed prepared wrongly can cloud title, trigger a transfer tax, or affect a title policy. A living trust only controls the assets actually retitled into it – which is the entire point of this section of the site.