A lot of Maryland homeowners set up a living trust and assume the job is done. It’s an understandable assumption — a trust is a serious step, and it often gets marketed as the tool that lets a family skip probate court entirely. But one of the most common questions estate planning attorneys hear is some version of do I need a will if I have a trust? The honest answer is usually yes, and the reason has less to do with legal technicalities than with real life: new bank accounts get opened, cars get bought, and personal belongings never quite make it onto a list. A trust only controls what’s actually inside it. A will fills in the rest. For homeowners in Frederick County and across Maryland, understanding how these two documents work together — rather than assuming one replaces the other — can be the difference between a smooth transition for their family and a messy one.
Renee Calloway kept the folder in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet in her home office in New Market, Maryland. Inside was the living trust she and her husband, Marcus, had set up three years earlier through an online service, back when their daughter left for college and the empty house made them start thinking seriously about “what happens if.” At the time, checking that box off the list felt like real progress. The website had walked them through naming the trust, listing the house, and adding their savings account. When the confirmation email arrived, Renee remembered feeling something close to relief. It was done. She didn’t have to think about it again.
For a while, she didn’t. Life moved the way it does — Marcus changed jobs, they refinanced the house, Renee opened a new retirement account through her employer. None of those things felt connected to the trust sitting quietly in the drawer.
Then her neighbor, Denise Okafor, lost her mother, Louise, in the spring. Louise had done everything “right,” Denise said one evening on the porch, her voice still tired from months of dealing with lawyers and paperwork. Louise had a trust. But her car, a small savings account she’d opened after the trust was created, and a few pieces of jewelry she’d never gotten around to listing were all still in her name alone when she passed. All of it ended up tangled in probate court anyway, dragging out for months and costing the family time and money they hadn’t planned for.
Renee couldn’t stop thinking about it. If Louise’s plan had gaps, what about theirs? She didn’t even know if their new accounts were titled correctly. Worse, she realized she and Marcus didn’t actually have a will — just the trust. She’d always assumed that was the same thing.
A few days later, Renee mentioned the whole situation to a coworker, Maya, who’d gone through her own estate planning the year before. Maya asked a simple question: “Do you have a pour-over will?” Renee had never heard the term. She felt a small wave of embarrassment, followed by the familiar knot of anxiety — had they missed something important?
That week, Renee called an estate planning attorney near Frederick and set up a consultation. She brought the folder with her, half-expecting to be told they’d wasted their money on the trust. Instead, the attorney reassured her that the trust itself was solid. The real issue was that it had never been paired with a will, and a few of their newer accounts had never been retitled into the trust’s name.
The attorney explained it in a way that finally made sense to Renee: a trust is like a moving truck. Anything loaded onto it — the house, the original accounts — travels directly to the family without stopping at probate court. But anything left sitting on the curb, like a car bought two years later or a stray savings account, doesn’t automatically hop on the truck. A will, specifically a type called a pour-over will, is what tells the court to gather up anything left behind and send it to the trust. A will also does something a trust cannot: it names a guardian for minor children and appoints someone to handle any loose ends. For Renee, this was the moment everything clicked. The trust and the will weren’t competing tools. They were a team, each covering what the other couldn’t.
Over the following weeks, Renee and Marcus worked with the attorney to draft a pour-over will and retitle the accounts that had slipped through the cracks. It took less time than Renee expected, and each step chipped away at the low-grade worry she’d been carrying since that conversation on Denise’s porch.
By the time they signed the final documents, Renee felt something different from the relief she’d felt three years earlier at her kitchen table. This time it wasn’t the relief of checking a box. It was the confidence of actually knowing the plan would work the way she and Marcus intended. She slept better. She stopped mentally cataloging their accounts at odd hours. When she told Denise what she’d learned, Denise nodded slowly, the way someone does when a hard lesson finally makes sense to someone else, too.
Renee and Marcus’s story points to a mistake that’s easy for any homeowner to make: assuming a trust is a complete estate plan all by itself. It’s not a flaw in trusts themselves — trusts are a genuinely useful tool, especially for homeowners trying to decide whether a trust actually makes sense for their situation. The problem shows up when a trust is treated as the finish line instead of one piece of a bigger plan.
In Maryland, a will still plays a role even when a trust exists. It catches assets that were never retitled, names guardians for children, and designates someone to handle anything left outside the trust. Without one, those loose ends can end up governed by the state’s default inheritance rules instead of the family’s actual wishes. A properly drafted will can also make the probate process faster and less stressful for the people left behind, which matters even for families who’ve done most of their planning through a trust.
The deeper lesson is about follow-through. A trust needs to be “funded,” meaning assets have to be formally retitled into it, and that funding has to be revisited every time a major purchase or new account enters the picture. A will, on its own, is worth having even for people who feel like their estate plan is already handled. For homeowners who did all their planning through an online service years ago and haven’t looked at it since, a short review with an attorney is often all it takes to find and close the same kind of gap Renee and Marcus discovered.
If reading Renee and Marcus’s story brought up a few uncomfortable questions about your own plan, you’re not alone — it’s one of the most common gaps in estate planning, and it’s usually simple to fix once someone takes a closer look. A good place to start is understanding what a complete plan actually includes, since a will and a trust are often meant to be paired together rather than chosen as an either-or option, as outlined in the firm’s overview of estate planning services, including wills, trusts, powers of attorney, and healthcare directives.
There’s no need to figure it out alone or guess whether your existing documents are actually working the way you think they are. A conversation with an estate planning attorney can clarify whether your trust is fully funded, whether you need a pour-over will, and what other gaps might be worth closing before they become a problem for the people you love.
Not usually. A trust only controls the assets that have actually been transferred, or “titled,” into it. A will still handles anything left outside the trust, and it can also name guardians for minor children and designate someone to manage the estate. Most complete estate plans include both documents working together.
If an asset was never retitled into the trust’s name, it generally doesn’t pass through the trust automatically. Instead, it may need to go through probate, and if there’s no will directing where it should go, Maryland’s default inheritance laws could decide who receives it, regardless of what you actually wanted.
A pour-over will is a specific type of will designed to work alongside a living trust. It directs any assets that weren’t formally placed in the trust during your lifetime to be transferred into the trust after you pass away, closing gaps like the ones Renee and Marcus discovered.
Yes. In fact, this is the standard approach most Maryland estate planning attorneys recommend. The trust handles the assets that are properly funded into it, while the will acts as a backup for anything that isn’t, along with handling matters a trust can’t address, like naming a guardian for children.
The clearest way is to review the trust document alongside a current list of your assets and account titles. An estate planning attorney can compare the two and identify anything, like a newer bank account, vehicle, or piece of property, that was never formally transferred into the trust’s name.
Yes, and it depends on the asset. For real estate specifically, some Maryland homeowners also look into transfer-on-death deeds as a more limited tool for passing a home without probate. It’s worth discussing with an attorney whether that fits alongside a will and trust or serves a different purpose.
