Legal Question in Wills and Trusts in Georgia

My best advice, unless you are an elder and probate lawyer and CPA is to stop making suggestions to her and simply make sure she gets good advice. She needs to sit down with a good lawyer and perhaps a CPA, without you there, as there are pros and cons to each approach and multiple means to each approach. A transfer now can have estate/gift tax implications, affects Medicaid/nursing home eligibility and also limits her control over what happens to the property, and may affect her property tax rate. OTOH, it does avoid probate, which may or may not matter depending on many things including potential future medical debt. If there is a transfer now, decisions also have to be made as to joint tenancy vs. a life estate and remainder. Transfers now are also advisable or inadvisable based on your present and future finances and debt, and your future plans for the asset. These are not simple issues and they can't be decided in a vaccum.

I agree with Attorney Ashman's advice. I don't know where this myth started that probate has to be avoided at all costs. Probate is not the plague and it is not all that bad, at least in Georgia and NC. I am sure that you have heard horror stories but you cannot compare what happened in someone else's case. And most of the stories have resulted from eithere no estate planning or poor planning.

As noted by Attorney Ashman, there are pros and cons for adding someone to the deed now. The answer as to which is "better" (neither is better - they are equal alternatives which depend on one's goals and circumstance) will depend on a whole hos of factor you do not discuss. While probate avoidance might make things easier for you, you do not want to jeopardize your mother's medicaid eligibility by making a gift. While she may not need Medicaid now, what if she falls and breaks her hip and has to go to rehab? Medicare only pays for 120 days of nursing care.

Your mother needs to see an experienced estate planning lawyer who can review all of her assets and circumstances and health as well as her existing will to see if it will suffice to meet her goals or if she needs to do something else. If you really loved her, you would be less concerned with making things easier in probate for you than you would be in helping see to it that she has a proper estate plan in place.