Texas Wills & Out of State Assests...

By Thomas Rose | Tue, 16 Dec 2008

Probating Wills prepared in states other than Texas often present their challenges. Frequently foreign Wills (that is, Wills prepared outside of Texas) do not appoint the executor as "independent" of court supervision. And in one case an 87 year old relatively new resident of Texas retained the services of a non-lawyer to prepare for her a revocable living trust (to "avoid" probate), who then failed to inform her that she also needed to transfer her assets to the revocable living trust for ownership.  This same non-lawyer also failed to prepare a "pour-over Will" for the new Texas resident (to facilitate transfer of any assets mistakenly omitted from the revocable living trust, into the trust), so the defective out-of-state Will had to be probated at additional cost in order to collect a negotiable security of nominal value.