Fitzgerald, GA Estate Planning Law Firms & Lawyers

You don't have any options. Your father has them. There are ways to help protect an estate plan against the possible results of a challenge and thereby better ensure that the desired beneficiary receives the intended assets. These could include your father creating a revocable trust and transferring the property to the Trustee of the trust before he dies, which could help avoid delay caused by a potential Will contest, giving you the property now or selling it to you (if doing so won't create problems for your father), or adding you as a joint owner now. But he should not take any steps without the help of an experienced estate planning attorney, and, since he is the owner of the property, HE has to be the one to take any such steps. You can't control the property right now, and there's nothing you can do to protect your expected inheritance except to try to ensure your father understands the potential value of doing good, solid, estate planning.

Your question does not make sense as asked. Your parents would not have one estate, they would have two separate estates (assuming they are both deceased). If they passed away in or before 2004, their estates should not still be open. The estates should have been administered, and all property distributed, by now.  

The answer to this question depends very heavily on (1) how the trust is written and (2) how the beneficiary designation was set up. The term "living trust" usually means a revocable living trust, and the general rule is that assets held by or paid to a revocable living trust can be accessed to pay the debts of the trust's deceased creator. But if the trust was structured to protect life insurance benefits specifically, it might not make them subject to creditor claims. The trust also might not be a revocable trust - it could have been an irrevocable trust created during the creator's lifetime - that is also technically a living trust although not that's not the most common use of that term. An irrevocable trust usually would be designed to avoid creditors claims made against the deceased creator. In addition, if this is a Georgia decedent, the minor child may be able to use a year's support right to get around the creditors' claims even if the life insurance might otherwise be exposed, even though there's a living trust in place and not simply a probate estate. If you really want an answer, I suggest that you contact a good estate attorney, preferably one with some litigation experience, and see if they can review the trust and the beneficiary designation and see what the situation actually is. It's too fact-dependent a question to be answered in this kind of forum.