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DH and I haven't set ours up yet, but we plan on it soon. My mother in law told me that you end up paying the same for a will and a trust. You pay the legal fees for the trust now and for the will later when it goes through probate. She says trusts are much easier than wills for whoever manages your estate after your gone. I haven't done any research on it myself yet so maybe someone who has can confirm that's true?

We set up simple wills ourselves. I consulted with an attorney but was not prepared to shell out the dough at the time (it was in the 1-2k range)

Once our assets are greater, we plan to have an attorney do a new estate plan for us including a trust. Maybe in 5-10 years.

We were lucky as when I worked for a CPA firm, there was an estate attorney on staff. They gave a discounted fee for employees, so we got a will, health directive and living trust setup for $750. My guess that the normal fee for all three would have been $1,500.

We felt it was important to do the trust so that we could determine if needed, how the money would be distributed and when. For example, our daughter would get a certain percentage at age 25, more at a later age and the full amount at a later age. It gives more control instead of the child being dumped with all this money or having the state decide how it should be disbursed.

We set up our estate plan after we had DD1. DH works for a financial institution and has quite a bit of experience in trusts and I'm an attorney, but I have no experience with trusts and estates outside of law school and he only interprets documents, so we wanted to hire someone to draft it properly. We paid our attorney $2,500 (in downtown Chicago, if that matters for reference) for pourover wills, revocable trusts, and powers of attorney for healthcare and property. We met with him once to discuss our goals and priorities, corresponded via email and then met again to discuss the contents and sign. It really wasn't too bad to transfer everything, though it did mean a little extra paperwork.

ETA: The cost for wills/testamentary trusts would have been $1,500.

We haven't done ours yet by my law firm provides these services for 2-3k. Do not pay 7k for trust documents!!

@catlady: Do you have legal benefits available through your employer (kind of like health insurance, but for legal services)? We do, via Hyatt, and the lawyer that is in network is the same one we would have used.

In my state, unless you've got assets over $5 million, your documents are going to be boilerplate, so there is no way I would spend $3k.