Every adult with assets or children needs one of these two documents, often both. A will distributes assets at death through the probate court. A trust holds assets during your life and after, bypasses probate, and stays private. Here is how to choose, what each costs, and how self-custodied Bitcoin complicates both.
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A will distributes your assets through probate - public, slow, sometimes expensive. A revocable living trust holds assets during your life and passes them privately at death, no probate required. Most simple estates need a good will and nothing more. If your net worth is above $200K, you own property in multiple states, you have a blended family, or you want privacy, add a revocable trust. Either way, self-custodied Bitcoin needs a separate access plan because a document alone cannot sign a transaction.
Not an attorney. This is education, not legal advice. State rules on wills, probate, and trusts vary substantially. For anything material, hire an estate attorney.
A will is a set of instructions that only take effect when you die. It has to be validated by a probate court before anything moves. Probate is public, can take six to eighteen months, and in some states costs a fixed percentage of the estate.
A trust is a legal entity that holds assets right now. You transfer assets into the trust; the trust owns them; you typically serve as the trustee while alive. At death, a successor trustee takes over and distributes assets per the trust document. No court involvement. No public filings. No waiting.
A will says "when I die, give these things to these people, and here is who is in charge." A trust says "these things are already held by a legal entity. When I die, the entity keeps operating with a new person at the wheel." That one structural difference is why trusts skip probate.
A will does four things. Names beneficiaries (who gets what). Names an executor (who carries it out). Names guardians for minor children if applicable. Handles any specific bequests or instructions.
Most people need a will at minimum. Without one, state intestacy law controls, and the default outcomes rarely match what anyone actually wants. An unmarried partner receives nothing. Stepchildren receive nothing. Your assets pass in fixed percentages to legally defined relatives regardless of the relationships you actually had.
"Revocable" means you can change or cancel it anytime while alive. "Living" means it exists and operates now, not at death. You are typically the grantor (creator), the trustee (manager), and the beneficiary (recipient) all at once while you are alive. At death, the successor trustee takes over.
The key step that trips people up is funding. A trust on paper does nothing. You have to re-title assets into the trust's name. House deeds, brokerage accounts, business interests. An unfunded trust is a prop. The documents sit in a drawer, the assets go through probate anyway.
An attorney drafts the trust, hands over a binder, and the client never re-titles a single asset into the trust. Five years later, everything still goes through probate. If you set up a trust, book a follow-up specifically to verify funding.
A pour-over will is the safety net that rides with a living trust. It says: anything I owned outside the trust at death "pours over" into the trust via probate and is then distributed according to the trust.
The pour-over still requires probate for whatever assets it catches, but it guarantees those assets reach the same distribution plan instead of being stranded under intestacy rules. Good backstop. Not a replacement for funding the trust properly in the first place.
Rough guidelines. None of these are hard rules, state by state.
Below those thresholds, a well-drafted will plus correct beneficiary designations often does everything a family needs.
A trust can legally hold Bitcoin. That is the easy part. The hard part is that whoever is trustee at any given moment needs the technical ability to actually sign a transaction. That means access to the seed phrase or the hardware wallet (or a sufficient subset, if you use multisig or Shamir).
Do not treat a self-custodied stack the same way you treat a Coinbase account. Writing "my BTC at Coinbase" in a will works because the exchange has a customer service process. Writing "my BTC in my cold wallet" in a will does not work because the will does not contain the thing that actually moves the coins.
Wills become public through probate. Anyone named in the probate docket can read the text. Putting seed words into a will is equivalent to posting them on a public bulletin board. Use a sealed letter of instructions that references your access setup instead, and see the Inheritance guide for the full pattern.
Budget a review every 3 to 5 years. Marriages, divorces, new kids, new homes, and state moves all change what the documents should say. A two-hour review is far cheaper than a contested probate.
Last updated 2026-04-14. Not legal advice. For anything material, consult an estate attorney.