Make sure your trustee(s) will follow all your wishes
When you have your trust prepared, you’re generally the trustee, and then you appoint one or two or more successor trustees. These are the people who take over when you can’t run the show yourself, either because you’re incapacitated, or you’ve resigned, or you’ve died. At that time, the successor trustee(s) takes control.
The hope, of course, is that the successor trustee(s) will follow your wishes, but you have to keep your wishes up to date and clear so that your wishes are expressed clearly in a written, legally correct document. If you want to make changes, make those changes while you can.
I had a couple in their 90s who had been my clients for more than 10 years, and then the wife fell ill and passed away. While the husband was still in charge, he became dismayed by some of his daughter’s comments and intentions. She was the successor trustee, and he was fearful that his new wishes wouldn’t be followed because they weren’t reflected in the original trust.
When his wife died, they had been married for 70 years. He had a caregiver living there to take care of his wife in her last months, and the caregiver also cooked and cleaned and somewhat cared for him as well as he started to age.
After his wife died, his daughter asked why the caregiver was still there, and she demanded her father get rid of her. Really?
The kids had left home some 40 or 50 years earlier, and it had just been him and his wife at home for the last 50 to 60 years, and now he had to get rid of the woman who was cooking for him and making sure he was OK. Money wasn’t an issue for my client, and he now paid much less because the caregiver had already found another job caring for someone else at their own home, but she continued to sleep at the man’s house and watch after him and cook for him. It was a safe and comfortable arrangement.
My client was devastated that his daughter had criticized him and that he was now forced to live alone as he aged and was in and out of the hospital. He said that with his wife gone, the house just got bigger and bigger and emptier and emptier with just him there alone.
But that wasn’t all of it. The couple also had a mildly disabled son who had been married and had children, and the parents had bought a house for him to live in a few hours away from them in a low-cost area. Yes, they could afford to do so, and they wanted to provide for their disabled son and his children.
When the daughter found out her disabled brother hadn’t paid rent to the parents in five years, she said that she would charge him the five years of rent upon the father’s death and take it from the share intended for the disabled son. Really? Wow!
Although each child stood to receive more than $3 million, the daughter in charge didn’t think it was fair that her disabled brother might receive a single penny more than her. But he wasn’t getting a larger inheritance, it was just that the parents hadn’t charged him rent because he was disabled.
The father was dismayed. He never expected such things from his daughter, who was already well off financially and doing better than his other children. He was disappointed and in shock that the daughter they had appointed as successor trustee seemed so greedy, heartless, and uncaring.
Unfortunately, the father is heading downhill rapidly. Perhaps his decline is due to his loneliness, the loss of his wife, and the loss of faith in his daughter. He knows he needs to come in and make changes to prop up his desire to protect the other children, but he sits at home in a state of mental shock and spends a lot of time crying from the loss of his wife and living in absolute loneliness. He feels horrible, but he can’t bring himself to make any changes or ask for his daughter to understand the wishes that he and his wife had for their children and grandchildren. He’s falling apart, and the daughter in charge doesn’t seem to care.
Don’t let something like this happen to you. If things are not going how you want, stand up for yourself, and stand up for your wishes. If the successor trustee wants to insert their own values over your values and wishes, maybe it’s time to appoint a new successor trustee.
Jim Ward is a longtime South Valley resident with his JD degree from New England and his LLM Estate Planning specialization degree from Florida. Jim has offices in South Valley and Willow Glen, and he also owns J. Ward Financial in Morgan Hill for wealth management services. He is a Master Elite Advisor for Ed Slott’s IRA Advisor Group and he holds the certifications of CFP®, RICP®, and CRPC®.
