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I. Living trusts are long, complicated documents.
II. Estate planning is a confusing and error-prone area of the law.
III. It's easy to walk out of an estate planning seminar with
more questions than you walked in with.
IV. Touted by groups such as AARP as well as independent
"estate planners," living trusts are becoming the hottest
and most misunderstood legal documents.
V. A revocable living trust can assure prudent asset management and
administration for beneficiaries who lack the necessary physical or
mental ability to perform such tasks for themselves.
VI. The majority of clients who are interested in and may benefit
from a living trust are not millionaires.
VII. While living trusts may provide no estate tax benefits, they
can often help to avoid lengthy and costly probate administration.
VIII. Living trusts can provide clients with a measure of privacy
not enjoyed during the typical public probate process.
IX. A living trust can be an excellent title-holding tool that
avoids lengthy and costly ancillary probate administration.
X. A living trust can help to avoid the delay that normally
accompanies the distribution of assets via the probate process.
The Genesis of WTrust
During the development and release process of Deed and
Document Pro for Windows (WDeed), we had a
feeling we were breaking new, exciting ground in automated document
preparation. We still do a good bit of deed preparation, so putting
ourselves in the place of our users, it was immediately apparent
that the new WDeed program was light years ahead of
its predecessor in terms of reliability, utility and ease of use.
After the release of WDeed, our first impressions were
confirmed without qualification by our users-and, after all, that's
the ultimate test. This is the framework upon which our new Living
Trust and Estate Planner (WTrust) was created.
WordPerfect and Word for Windows - Word Processor Compatibility
WTrust lets you do all your formatting, previewing
and printing in your own word processor. For attorneys who
touch-type and for all legal secretaries, this is a major
breakthrough. Because law office computing is approximately 90% word
processing, what could be more comfortable and user-friendly than to
use your own word processor to format and print WTrust
documents? Character formatting such as Old English fonts, special
paragraph formatting, manipulation of page breaks, and text editing
in general, including spell checking and grammar checking, is all a
piece of cake once you're in your own word processor. Furthermore,
the link between WTrust and your word processor is
quick, easy, seamless and invisible. Just one mouse click!
Breaking the Code
WTrust has the capability to permit users to
actually go into the program to set up documents specifically for
their office. A particular deed or document often changes slightly
from state to state or even from county to county based on local
custom and practice. The design of our new WTrust
takes this need into consideration by letting you break into the
program document templates themselves and customize them just about
any way you want. If, for example, you always use some special
language in your revocable living trusts, WTrust gives
you access to the actual templates. By modifying these templates,
you can insert your handcrafted clauses into WTrust
itself. Therefore, every new document you create has your language
in it automatically without your needing to key it in manually.
Setting the Defaults
We took one more step to speed up the document creation process.
The document templates are one thing, but there's also the matter of
"filling in the blanks." There's a good amount of
information that does not change from document to document. A
typical example may involve inserting an attorney's name, address
and telephone number in as preparer of a particular document. To
expedite this process, we designed WTrust to allow you
to set certain default information that is part of the document but
not part of the template so that you don't need to reenter
information in the Document Wizard (see next page) that rarely, if
ever, changes.
Living Trust and Estate Planner - Program Features
The Problem and the Solution
Living trust software seems to fall
into two categories: bargain basement stuff designed by idiots for
idiots, and extremely expensive and complicated packages designed to
plan the estates of Donald Trump or the Rockefellers. If you're
looking for trust software for your typical small to medium-sized
law office that services ordinary people, you'll have to look long
and hard and you probably won't find anything! We spent hours on the
Internet and found zilch.
Living Trust and Estate Planner for
Windows (WTrust) was created to fill the chasm between
these two extremes. It's an extraordinary program designed for
ordinary estates. WTrust does not stop
with the trust forms. WTrust also contains
many of the complimentary documents that are necessary or useful in
completing the estate plan. WTrust has a
pour-over will for catching property or assets that never made it to
the trust estate, a certificate or abstract of trust for disclosing
the existence of the trust and parties while maintaining privacy.
This is one of the advantages of trusts. WTrust
also contains a variety of documents for transferring property to
the trust estate such as deeds and bills of sale, and a compliment
of other documents such as living will declaration, durable power of
attorney for health care and general durable power of attorney. See
the complete list on the following page.
Document Wizards
You won't have to struggle with WTrust.
The Document Wizards take you through each document, step-by-step,
asking simple questions about the document, providing examples of
the information required and often suggesting answers based on your
worksheet entries. When you've completed a document's wizard, WTrust
completes the document for you by inserting your information in the
proper places. Moreover, WTrust will
analyze hundreds of places in the documents where there are nouns,
verbs, adverbs, etc., and make sure that every insertion is
grammatically correct. One of the most common problems with lengthy
documents like trusts is that law offices have worked with them for
so long and so often, the documents are practically immune to
proof-reading. Furthermore, spell checkers don't know when the word
"of" is misspelled as the word "or."
Consequently, it's easy for embarrassing grammatical errors to be
overlooked when preparing these types of documents. WTrust
solves that problem by giving you a complete document you can -
well, trust. That saves you from looking like a fool when a client
actually reads the document at home and finds mistakes, however
incongruous.
List of Integrated Documents
Trusts & Wills:
Revocable Living Trust - A Style
Revocable Living Trust - AB Style
Pour-Over Will
Certificate/Abstract of Trust
Transfer Documents:
Warranty Deed
Warranty Deed (Joint & Survivorship)
Quit-Claim Deed
Bill of Sale
Miscellaneous:
Living Will Declaration
Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care
General Durable Power of Attorney
Summary of Features
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Windows 98/95/NT. WTrust
is a 32-bit Windows program. This means it will
run in Windows 98, Windows 95 or Windows
NT. It will not run in Windows 3.1 or Windows for
Workgroups 3.11.
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Word Processor Compatibility. WTrust
is compatible with any word processor that can open rich
text format (RTF) files which includes Microsoft's Word and
Corel's WordPerfect.
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Context-Sensitive Help. You can press
<F1> on any menu item and instantly receive help related
to that command.
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Balloon Hints. Rest your cursor on a
button or window object and a help window appears, giving you
information about that button or object's function.
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Windows Copy/Paste Compatibility.
If you have a lengthy legal description in your word processor,
you can utilize WTrust's Copy/Paste
functions to copy and paste to or from any Windows
program.
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Tool Bar. Not that you don't have the
menu bar and pop-up menus for performing common functions, we've
included a tool bar to provide one-click implementation of most
common program commands.
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Pop-Up Menus. Right-click your mouse to
access pop-up menus for common functions like saving files,
starting new files and previewing and printing documents.
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