How Does a Living Trust Work in Arizona?

It’s not magic, it’s just smart planning. A living trust gives you control while you’re alive, protection if you’re not, and a clean hand-off for your family later.

What Exactly Is a Living Trust?

Think of it as a legal container that holds your assets, with rules you set.

You create the container, you decide what goes in, and you decide who gets it later. While you’re alive, you’re in complete control. You can add assets, remove them, or dissolve the trust entirely. That’s why most are called revocable living trusts. You’re the boss until you’re gone. To see how this compares with other tools, check our full guide on Trusts vs Wills.

The Arizona Advantage

Arizona probate is slow, expensive, and public, trusts are designed to avoid it.

Here’s the catch with Arizona law: if your estate is above certain limits, your family could face probate. As of June 30, 2025, anything over $200,000 in personal property or $300,000 in real estate equity requires probate unless you’ve set up other transfers. See A.R.S. § 14-3971. For a full breakdown, read our update on Arizona probate thresholds in 2025.

Probate here usually takes 12–18 months and eats up 4–7% of the estate in fees. On a $300,000 estate, that’s $12,000 to $21,000 gone. A trust sidesteps that whole mess.

How It Actually Works

You stay in charge now, and your successor trustee takes over smoothly later.

Say you create the “Maria Lopez Living Trust.” You transfer your house, bank accounts, and investments into it. On paper, the trust owns everything, but you’re still trustee, so nothing really changes. When you sign checks or documents, you just add “Trustee” after your name.

If you become incapacitated, your successor trustee, maybe your son or daughter, can step in immediately. No guardianship hearing, no court oversight. When you pass away, that trustee follows your instructions: pay bills, file taxes, and distribute assets. What takes courts a year or more, your trustee can often finish in weeks or months. Learn more about this hand-off in our FAQ on successor trustee support.

What Goes Into Your Trust?

The trust only works if you put assets into it, this step is called funding.

• Real estate: Deed your home or rentals to the trust now, or record a beneficiary deed. Related read: putting a house in a trust with a mortgage.
• Bank and investment accounts: Change the title or list the trust as beneficiary. For a walk-through, see our step-by-step guide to funding your trust.
• Life insurance: Make the trust the beneficiary if you want payouts handled by your trustee.
• Business interests and valuables: Assign ownership to the trust or sign a property memorandum.

Arizona law makes this practical with a Certification of Trust, a short document you can hand to banks or title companies instead of your full trust. See A.R.S. § 14-11013.

What Not to Put in Directly

Some accounts already have their own probate-avoiding shortcuts.

Retirement accounts like IRAs or 401(k)s shouldn’t be retitled into your trust because of tax rules. Instead, list your trust as a beneficiary if you want it to control how funds are distributed. For pros and cons, check our FAQ on trusts as IRA beneficiaries.

The Pour-Over Will Connection

Your will acts like a safety net for anything left outside the trust.

A “pour-over will” directs stray assets into your trust at death. It also covers guardianship for minor children, something the trust itself doesn’t handle. Even with a living trust, you still need this backstop. To compare options, see Wills Explained.

Privacy Matters

Probate files are public; a trust keeps your family’s business private.

Anyone can walk into the courthouse and pull probate files. Trust administration, on the other hand, happens off the record. Your trustee may need to show proof to a bank, but that’s where the Certification of Trust comes in handy.

The Bottom Line

A living trust is one of the clearest gifts you can leave your family in Arizona.

It gives you control during life, protection if you’re incapacitated, and a smoother, cheaper transition after you pass. Done right, and funded properly, it avoids the cost, delay, and publicity of probate. It’s not magic. It’s just smart planning.

If you’re curious about more advanced tools, you can also read about the difference between revocable and irrevocable trusts.