You really, seriously, need to pay for the services of a competent estate planning attorney. In the USA, the kind of sophisticated estate planning you are talking will cost you several thousand dollars in attorney's fees. If you can't afford that, then your net worth is not high enough and you don't really need the kind of complex planning you are talking about. This is simply not true. I am not an attorney. However, I am licensed tax advisor and I am very familiar with estate planning in the USA. A trust can be revocable or irrevocable, and there is in fact a major difference. A revocable trust allows you to make changes while you are still alive, including replacing the trustee, or changing the beneficiaries, or making distributions to yourself to remove money or property from the trust. A revocable trust becomes irrevocable when you die. This is true. And transferring property into a trust can be complicated and expensive, especially when it involves real estate. And it can trigger gift taxes and other complicated issues. But if the trust is revocable, you can make changes before you die, and as I noted above, that includes the power to pull money or other assets out of the trust. There is also something called a testamentary trust, which is an extension of your will. A testamentary trust does not even come into existence until you die. It is created within your will. With that type of trust, you do not transfer assets during your lifetime. I have had tax clients who set up trusts during their lifetime, and then died, and the process worked exactly as they wanted it to. @Pricechange somehow seems to think that there are all kinds of secrets that lawyers and accountants "don't want you to know," and that the whole system is somehow rigged or broken. It's not. This is silly, wrongheaded thinking. There is no completely foolproof way to insure that everything happens exactly as you want after you die. Executors can fail, through negligence or through malicious intent, and the beneficiaries might have to go to court to try to correct those failures, or get a new executor appointed. Heirs can contest a will. One of your heirs might die before you, and then you die before you have a chance to change your will or trust, and then the part of your estate that would go to that heir goes to their next of kin, which might not be what you wanted. Things can go wrong, and no estate plan is completely bulletproof. But you can minimize the probability of things going wrong by hiring competent professionals. BMK