Don’t Forget your Furry Friends! How to Provide for Pets in Your Estate Plan

​By Attorney Edward Jesson

At Jesson & Rains, we love our pets (as you can hopefully see from the fine selection of Jesson & Rains’ dogs, cats, and horses above!). A question we often get from clients is how they can make sure that their beloved furry friends are taken care of when they pass away. Luckily, under North Carolina law, there is a way to ensure that your pets are still cared for if something were to happen to you!

Agree with it or not, pets are considered personal property, just like a car! Ensuring that your pets are taken care of when you pass away can be as simple as stating in your will that any pets you own at the time of your passing as well as a certain amount of money for the care of those pets passes to your pet-loving friend. However, this can sometimes be insufficient: what if your friend no longer loves pets and decides to pocket the money and give the pets to a shelter? What if you have more pets when you pass away and the money left for their care is inadequate?  Or is too much?

Fortunately, in North Carolina and South Carolina (and in most states), you can create a “pet trust.” The general concept is that you name a caretake for your pet and set aside a specific amount of money to be held in trust for the care of the pet.  The trustee, a different person from the caretaker, then distributes money to the caretaker as needed.  When the last of the pets pass away, the money that is leftover could to go the caretaker, or you can always dictate that the remainder of the funds gets directed to another person or organization. If the caretaker doesn’t keep the pets, they don’t get any money, so they’re incentivized.  Plus, there’s a third-party trustee involved to make sure the pets are cared for.

The idea of a pet trust becomes even more important when you have animals that you wish to be cared for that may have long lives, such as horses, or reptiles. Another situation in which a pet trust can be very important is if you have a pet with special needs that needs an elevated level of care over its lifetime.

Interestingly, North Carolina and South Carolina law is different – in South Carolina, you can create a pet trust for future pets so long as they are alive at the time of your death.  In North Carolina, though, if the pet trust is created in a revocable living trust, the pet trust can only cover “designated” pets alive at the time of the creation of the trust, so providing for future pets may be necessary in a testamentary trust (which is created only at death).  This highlights the importance of using a knowledgeable attorney!  Whatever your situation, the attorneys at Jesson & Rains are happy to talk about taking care of your furry family, as well as your human family, when you pass away.