Holding property in trust offers little benefit to me. The benefit is to my heirs should I die or be deemed incompetent.
Basically, a trust lays the framework to transfer assets from me to my heirs without going through the government at all.
Without it, the assets go through a process called probate, which is basically a scam for a govt employee to charge my wife and/or kids $10K to $100K to shuffle papers around for two years before they actually get the stuff that I will to them.
With a trust, probate is avoided. Some inheiritance tax is avoided, but not all. The real benefit is to avoid probate.
If I recall, the right kind of trust also avoids a reset of taxable value when a house is transferred to the kids.
