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San Diego Estate Planning & Trust Document Notarization
By choosing SD Signings for your estate plan notarizations, you’re choosing a great experience at the signing table. We are streamlined, efficient, and precise. With thousands of transactions of experience you can depend on quality and accurate work. Consider SD Signings when its time to coordinate your documents so that you can feel confident that your notary transaction was handled with care.
SD Signings Notary can notarize your trust.
SD Signings can work directly with you or your law firm for the notary of your living trust, trust agreement, or other trust documents. We are skilled in the notarization of all these items.
5 ways to Streamline Estate Plans when signing with the Notary
As a law firm, time is valuable for you and your clients. When it’s time for your clients to meet with a notary, we’ve developed a few methods to make it fast. If your clients have read through the documents and are entirely ready to go, Streamlined Estate plans may be completed in 15 minutes or less.
1. Use a reliable and experienced notary
By using an experienced and reliable notary, you can trust in advance that they are prepared for your estate plan signing before it’s even started. The notary will understand the paperwork coming and how exactly to care for it. Having worked with the same reliable notary again and again, you will become a two part team quickly streamlining through your established system. The notary may also serve as a second set of eyes to make sure all documents are executed properly and nothing is missed. By having a reliable and experienced notary, you will become efficient while inadvertently employing a quality control agent for each document signing. Life just got easier. Save approximately 30 minutes.
2. Forward the documents or document names to your Notary in Advance
The more information a notary has before they get started, the better. An estate planning attorney may eliminate the extra time it takes for the notary to fill out acknowledgments or journal entries by providing the notary with the documents (or list of doc names) in advance. By doing so, the notary will be able to be prepared. They’ll may have acknowledgments, jurats, journal entries, and even invoicing ready in advance. At most, all your notary will have to do at the table is sign, stamp, and affix the certificate. This will only take 10 seconds as opposed to the multiple minutes per document. The notary will also feel prepared and relaxed, being able to help you with organization and double-checking. Save approximately 1-3 minutes per notarized document.
3. Include Acknowledgments (or Jurats) with Notary Name already Pre-filled.
Many Law firms and estate planning attorneys have found that it is easier to include notary acknowledgments (or jurats) already completed. The notary certificate would be attached to the back of a document like a trust or a power of attorney when documents are drafted. It would be completed in advance with the appearance date, notary commission name, and signer’s names. The notary simply just signs and stamps the document during the signing ceremony. The other and more time consuming option would be for the notary to have to fill out their own notarial certificates after each document. By providing pre-fill acknowledgements you can save time and eliminate notary mistakes before the signing even happens. Save approximately 1-3 minutes per notarized document.
4. Ensure Signer Understands Documents and All Clients Questions are Answered Before the Signings.
Having automated a system to ensure signers are all ready, many attorneys will send the documents to clients in advance with plenty of time for review. Sending out an additional email in prior to your notary appointment will make sure specifics are addressed. That email may touch on areas within the documents that typically would provoke questions or need clarity at the conference table. Explaining these things out in advance will also eliminate unease and uncertainty at the conference table. Knowing signers are confident before the appointment will also minimize the possibility for rushed last minute corrections which give way for errors. Create a system to establish confidence for your clients in advance. That confidence will translate into swift signers. Save approximately 15-60 minutes.
5. Repeat your perfected Estate Plan Signing routine.
You and your notary have perfected the signing routine! The classical music is playing softly at volume 2. The fancy blue pens lay perfectly uniform in the center of the table. The thermostat is set at a comfortable 72 degrees. Your clients enter the room refreshed and like a beautiful symphony, the papers begin to be passed from person to person with perfect harmony. Everyone is personable, laughter is shared, and the perfect estate plan ceremony is being conducted. You are that conductor! Your reputation for being exceptional grows and your business flourishes. You’ve done it! Estate plan finished within your perfect parameters!
Common Estate Planning Documents that are notarized
The “Trust“ is a fiduciary arrangement that allows a third party, or trustee, to hold assets on behalf of a beneficiary or beneficiaries.
The “Living Trust” is a written legal document that partially substitutes for a will. The State Bar of California describes a “Living Trust” (sometimes called an “inter vivos” or “revocable” trust) as follows, “with a living trust, your assets (your home, bank accounts and stocks, for example) are put into the trust, administered for your benefit during your lifetime, and then transferred to your beneficiaries when you die.”
The “Certification of Trust” is a document that may provide limited but essential information about your trust. It can be given to banking institutions, brokerages, escrows, or third parties, while the document still provides privacy to other specifics of the trust itself.
The “Durable Power of Attorney“, a document often use to designate an agent to act on someone’s behalf (principal) concerning financial matters, even after they become incapacitated. This may include matters of banking, real estate, and/or business on behalf of the principal as indicated on the document.
The “Declaration of Trust” also known as a trust instrument helps to create the trust.
The “Advance Health Care Directive” is a document that touches on the matters and intentions of one’s decisions health care wishes concerning treatment, especially for end of life decisions. It is a directive to physicians.
The “HIPAA Waiver” or “Authorization for Use and Disclosure of Protected Health Information” documents may allow someone’s health care individual be disclosed to a third party as indicated within the document.
The “Assignment of Personal Property” mimics its name in assigning any personal items into a trust.
A “Grant Deed to Revocable Trust” is often signed and recorded with the county to move a property within the revocable trust.
Other common trusts include irrevocable trusts, charitable trusts, asset protection trusts, special needs trusts, totten trusts, tax by-pass trusts, and Bridge Trusts.
Please note, California law does not allow us to draft documents or provide legal advice as we are not attorneys. Please consult a qualified attorney for a great estate planning experience.
Acting persons and capacities within a trust that may need a notary.
A “trustor” or “settlor“, is the person who creates a trust. This person has usually worked alongside a qualified attorney to draft the documents according to their wishes, for the sake of themselves, others, and future beneficiaries of their assets.
A “trustee“, is the person who manages the trust, specific assets, or roles within the trust. Married couples will usually act as “co-trustees“, being available to execute full or partial powers of the trust according to their specific documents.
A “successor-trustee“, is often a person succeeding the trustees to manage the trust when the initial “trustees” are no longer able to act usually bc on incapacity or death.
