Who should you appoint as trustee of your trust?

Creating a trust can be a useful strategy when planning your estate and is often unavoidable. The use of a trust is often essential for distributing one’s hard-earned wealth according to one’s wishes. It is also useful for protecting that wealth from creditors who might lay claim against the trustmaker. However, an essential component of establishing a trust is deciding who will manage it.

Choosing a family member

Although the natural reaction is to appoint a family member as trustee, settling or managing a trust can be extremely time-consuming and confusing. It can be overwhelming and will require one to make tough and emotional decisions. The successor will also have a strict fiduciary duty for the beneficiaries of that trust which is often overlooked in the case of family members. Many families are broken apart because of petty disputes that arise with the settlement of a trust or estate.

Choosing a bank

In order to remedy potential conflicts, it may be necessary to select a professional trustee and/or executor. In this case, the trustmaker will often choose a bank to act as successor trustee. What beneficiaries soon discover is that choosing a bank or financial institution will come with a glaring conflict of interest, where the bank will use trust money to invest in their own products one hundred percent of the time. They will also withhold money from your beneficiaries, keeping your money “in the pot” for the sake of increasing their capital gains. Accountability to the beneficiaries is, therefore, overlooked and your local professionals are instantly cut out of the loop in favor of these faceless corporations. This is not to mention the lack of communication and long wait times that trustmakers or beneficiaries have experienced when dealing with a big bank as their trustee.

Choosing an attorney

Some people choose an attorney to act as successor trustee. Estate planning attorneys are more likely to have the knowledge and expertise in order to effectively administer a trust. They may be a neutral third party who can mediate between family members after their clients pass away and can litigate on behalf of the trust in the case that creditors or adverse interests attempt to sue the trust. With most trusts, however, there is no litigation or legal contests to the trust that would require such an option, and the attorney would be occupied only with the administrative process such as forms and phone calls.

Choosing a fiduciary at Acumen

Our independent trustees have no conflicts of interest in administering your trust. Our trustees are independent from any bank, financial institution, or law firm. We are not a trust company, and trust funds are not reinvested and managed in-house. Instead, our trustees collaborate with your trusted financial and legal professionals solely according to their expertise in their field and the value gained through their collaboration. If the benefit of the of the financial products to the beneficiaries diminish, we may look elsewhere to meet the needs of the trust. We are also happy to pay out to beneficiaries when it aligns with the trust provisions, and not some internal memo like at the big banks, maximizing their capital gains.

In this way, our independent status assures the maximum benefit to the beneficiaries of the trusts and estates that we serve. Not only are our trustees independent from financial institutions or banks, they are also held to the highest levels of professionalism and a strict code of ethics as members of the Independent Trustee Alliance (ITA).