"protect assets" from whom or what?
Bitter/crazy/evil future ex-SIL/DILs, Medicaid, and lawsuits are the usually named villains.
If you TOD your financial accounts then how is the funeral paid for? I'm assuming there isn't a surviving spouse. Do you not TOD one account and have the will specify to pay for it?
Lots of solutions, including the one you named. Other options:
* Executor sells estate assets to pay for the funeral
* Family pays for the funeral out of pocket and then are "reimbursed" by estate/beneficiary/TOD assets they receive.
* Estate is insolvent, nobody steps up as executor. State or Fed probably pays in this case.
designed by lawyers to make you buy useless trust packages? I live in Virginia. I have one husband and one adult child. I'm thinking of doing my own will. Is probate really that big a deal? Why do so many people have trusts? My own father was bamboozled into getting a trust that we had to redo at the end of his life. The lawyer who did it was no longer practicing. It was one of those deals where they lure people in with a steak dinner and then sell them a trust. My father was a retired Navy chief originally from the Philippines, so I suspect having a trust made him feel like he'd made it.
Trusts have their uses and benefits, but also their drawbacks. Trust attorneys offering free dinners probably focus on the former and not the latter.
My story is that my parents set up two trusts in the late 1990s. They paid several thousand dollars for the legal services and documents. This was set up to keep assets from being subject to estate taxes, which were predicted to be onerous.
In 2016 when my Mom passed away, the lawyers said we should have kept things updated (which would have cost thousands). But since we hadn't and their documents didn't keep up with their wishes, financial situation, and legal changes, we ended up doing a TEDRA thing which cost $16K in legal fees, took several months, and required lots of signatures and documents and review. This ended up changing the amount of money from being subject to estate taxes.
Nowadays, I get to file a 1041 for the trust every year, and the trust income is subject to heavy taxation (See 1041 Schedule G for the rate tables; they're quite aggressive.) We could DNI the income, but there are drawbacks to that as well (complexity, estate tax implications).
Now I have been advised by trust attorneys to do more paperwork and legal maneuvers to stick some of that money in places where it would in fact be subject to estate taxes, which would help us get a second basis step-up on that money. This third set of maneuvers would put my Dad more or less in the same spot as he was in the 1990s before the legal maneuvering.
Summary: lots of time, money, hassle, stress, paperwork to avoid taxes that might not have to be paid anyway. And you're paying money up front to avoid *potentially* paying later.