I have always found it interesting that older North Carolina trusts sometimes have a $1 or $10 bill taped to the last page. Before 2007, former N.C. Gen. Stat. § 31-47 allowed a pour-over will to devise property “to the trustee of any trust … if established in writing prior to the execution of such will.” Because a trust still needed a corpus under common law trust principles, practitioners would “fund” the trust with a nominal $1 or $10 bill to be sure the trust “existed” when the will was signed.
In 2007, the North Carolina General Assembly rewrote N.C.G.S. § 31-47 and added the language that a pour-over is valid “regardless of the existence, size, or character of the corpus of the trust during the testator’s lifetime.” In other words, a will can now pour into a trust that was unfunded during life. It is curious that there was a requirement to begin with if a $1 or $10 bill was an easy workaround.