Tag: Married Couple Planning

Video

Hi folks, it’s Andy Stautz at Stautz Law. I’m back for another quick talk about basic estate planning topics. Today’s topic is joint tenancies.  

Joint tenancies are a type of real property ownership. It’s kind of one of the ways you can own property. So you can own property just as yourself as a natural person, right? A corporation or an LLC can own property.  

You can also own property with other people. You know, two people on the same deed for a parcel of land or a house. And it’s really, really common. The most common situation is when a husband and wife own a house together. That’s a type of joint tenancy.  

It’s actually a special kind of joint tenancy called tenants by the entirety. But you don’t have to be married. 

You can be a joint tenant basically by deciding to title real property into your name and the name of your co-owner. So the interesting thing about joint tenancy is you and your co-owner (or co-owners if there’s more than one) really share the property. It’s not like one of you has half of it and the other you of you has half of it. When you’ve got separate shares like that it’s called tenants in common, and that’s different.  

So joint tenancy: all of the joint tenants, all of the multiple owners, you know, get to use the property. The property is theirs, but they can’t separately, sell or deal with some portion of the property’s value.  

The interesting feature for estate planning purposes is that most joint tenancies–the overwhelming majority–have what’s called a right of survivorship. And tenants by the entirety with married couples also has this right by survivorship.  

And that means if one of the owners dies, the remaining owners would get it automatically. I mean the owner who dies, you know, goes away. And it’s automatically… the property remains with the other owner or owners. So there’s no, there’s no probate process, there’s no uh, you know, re-deeding anything. The only thing you need to do that is what’s called an affidavit of survivorship, and that is the topic of my next video.