National Estate Planning Awareness Week runs October 19 through 25 this year, an observance the U.S. House of Representatives first adopted back in 2008 to get more people thinking seriously about estate planning rather than putting it off indefinitely. Most of what gets written during this week focuses on wills and trusts in the abstract. We wanted to come at it from a more specific angle: if you’ve bought, or are about to buy, a home here in South Carolina, you’ve already made at least one real estate planning decision whether you realized it at the time or not, because how your name appears on that deed determines what happens to the property when you’re gone.
The Decision You Make at Every Closing, Whether You Notice It or Not
Every deed has to specify how title is held, and in South Carolina that choice generally falls into one of a few categories: sole ownership, tenants in common, joint tenancy with right of survivorship, or title held in the name of a revocable living trust. This isn’t a minor technicality buried in the paperwork. It’s the single factor that determines whether your home passes automatically to a co-owner the moment you die, or whether it has to go through probate first. We’ve written before about what actually happens on a South Carolina closing day, and this is exactly the kind of detail that gets decided at that table, often quickly, sometimes without buyers fully registering what they just chose.
Why Probate Is the Thing Most Buyers Are Actually Trying to Avoid
For a simple estate, probate in South Carolina takes a minimum of about six months, and creditors get up to eight months to come forward with claims against the estate before it can be fully settled. Estates under $45,000 can sometimes use a simplified procedure, but most homes here are worth considerably more than that, so a house without the right titling in place typically means the full process. None of this is catastrophic, but it’s slower and more involved than most people expect, and it’s almost always avoidable with the right title choice made at purchase rather than sorted out by heirs after the fact.
The Titling Options Available to You in South Carolina
Joint tenancy with right of survivorship is the one most co-buyers reach for instinctively, and for good reason: when one owner dies, the property passes automatically and immediately to the surviving owner, no probate required. Tenants in common sounds similar but works very differently, each owner holds a distinct, separate share of the property, and that share passes through that owner’s estate, probate included, rather than automatically to the other co-owner. This distinction matters enormously for unmarried couples, parents who co-purchase with an adult child, or anyone in a second marriage with kids from a prior relationship, and it’s exactly the kind of thing worth confirming explicitly rather than assuming the deed already says what you intended.
Taking title in the name of a revocable living trust is the other major option, and it’s the one we see more relocating retirees ask about specifically. A home titled to a trust rather than to you individually generally bypasses probate entirely, since the trust itself, not you personally, is the legal owner, and the trust’s own terms dictate what happens to the property after your death without court involvement.
Why South Carolina Doesn’t Have Transfer-on-Death Deeds, At Least Not Yet
If you’re moving here from a state that allows transfer-on-death deeds, a simpler mechanism that lets you name a beneficiary directly on the deed without a trust, it’s worth knowing South Carolina hasn’t adopted that option. A bill that would create one, S. 49, has been sitting in the Senate Judiciary Committee since January 2025 without further action, so for now, the tools available here remain survivorship titling and a revocable living trust rather than a transfer-on-death deed. If you’re coming from a state where a TOD deed was part of your plan, that specific tool simply isn’t available on a South Carolina property today, which makes it worth revisiting your approach with an attorney rather than assuming the same strategy carries over.
The Trap We See Most Often With Relocating Buyers
A lot of buyers moving here from the Northeast already have a will or a trust drafted years ago under a different state’s law, and the assumption is usually that it “covers everything” automatically. It often doesn’t, at least not cleanly. An existing revocable living trust doesn’t do anything for a new South Carolina property unless that specific property actually gets retitled into the trust’s name after closing, a step that’s easy to overlook once the excitement of a move settles into the routine of actually living here. Even if your trust document itself is perfectly valid across state lines, a home you bought in your own name after the trust was created isn’t automatically inside it. If avoiding probate on your South Carolina home is part of your plan, it’s worth confirming directly, with your estate attorney, whether that property actually needs to be deeded into your trust as a separate step, rather than assuming the trust you already have takes care of it.
Why This Week Is a Good, Low-Pressure Prompt to Actually Handle It
South Carolina is an attorney-closing state, so there’s already a licensed attorney involved in every purchase here, which is a genuine advantage compared to states where closings run entirely through a title company. That said, your closing attorney and your estate planning attorney aren’t necessarily the same person, and the closing table itself isn’t really the moment for a deep conversation about your broader estate plan. National Estate Planning Awareness Week is a reasonable nudge to have that conversation before your next closing rather than during it, so the titling decision reflects an actual plan rather than whatever felt like the default in the moment.
If you’re actively searching for a home here and want to think through titling before you’re sitting at the closing table, reach out to our team and we’re happy to walk through the options and connect you with an estate attorney if you don’t already have one here. And if you’re still in the searching phase, browsing what’s currently available across Myrtle Beach is a good place to start while you sort out the rest.