Most of what you own can go in: your home, your cash and savings, your brokerage accounts, your business interests, life insurance. A few things stay out and keep their own rules: mainly retirement accounts like a 401(k) or IRA, which you handle with beneficiary designations instead.
Now the part almost every article skips. Signing the trust document is not the finish line. A trust only works for the assets you actually put into it, a step called “funding,” which usually means changing the title on your house or the name on an account. A trust with nothing in it does nothing. As one person put it: a trust with no assets is worthless.
This is where most people fail. They pay a lawyer, get a nice document, and never finish moving their assets in, so when it matters, half their estate goes to court anyway. The document was never the hard part. The follow-through was.
That follow-through is the part we actually handle. Most places sell you the document and wish you luck. We make sure the trust is real (funded, current, and doing its job), not a file collecting dust in a drawer.