in Helpful Insights, Trustee Tips
Trustee Responsibilities: 6 Common Challenges for Trustees
As a trustee, you hold a position of significant responsibility. Your role involves managing trust assets and making decisions that directly impact the beneficiaries. However, this role is not without its challenges and potential pitfalls. Missteps can lead to legal...
Trustee responsibilities
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 in Helpful Insights
Choose a Trustee with These Three Characteristics
If it’s time to choose a trustee, carefully consider these three characteristics: their reputation, empathy, and procedural approach. Transitioning from a long-standing relationship with an advisor, teacher, coach, doctor, lawyer, CPA, trustee, or financial advisor - whether due to retirement...
Choose a Trustee
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 in Trustee Tips
Can Irrevocable Trusts Protect Assets in Divorce?
Court Issues Yet Another Ruling Casting Doubt on the Ability of Irrevocable Trusts to Protect Assets in Divorce. In Jones v. Jones (2023), the Massachusetts Appeals Court followed a long line of cases in deciding when a third-party trust (one...
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 in Helpful Insights, Trustee Tips
Trust Accounting to Beneficiaries: What to Expect
Trust Accounting. Boring! (Not if you're a beneficiary) “Tell me the bottom line!”, the beneficiary feels like yelling. “Did I make money or lose?”  One of the duties of a trustee is to provide financial information to beneficiaries. Unlike a...
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 in Helpful Insights, Trustee Tips
How Does a HEMS Trust Standard Affect Trust Distributions?
HEMS is a common acronym used in estate planning. What does it mean? It has nothing to do with sewing. This is a different kind of hems! Many trusts include a HEMS standard which is a tool that grantors have...
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93
 in Helpful Insights, Trustee Tips
How a Trust Protector Can Rescue Irrevocable Trusts
The term Trust Protector carries the connotation of a superhero, poised to come to the rescue when called upon. A Trust Protector’s role is to guide a trustee to ensure that a grantor’s intentions and wishes are carried out. It’s...
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165
 in Helpful Insights, Trustee Tips
When and How to Remove a Trustee
Are you considering how to remove a trustee who you feel is not doing their job or is incompatible? While you may feel there “should” be a straightforward response to your problem, often there is not. Depending on the trust,...
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178
 in Helpful Insights, Trustee Tips
The Trustee–Beneficiary Relationship: Building Trust Through Understanding, Process, & Accounting
You’re facing a new trustee appointment with a trust you didn’t write and beneficiaries you didn’t previously know. This article sets out an indelible process to help you build a relationship, establish rapport, and do well in your new position....
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180
 in Trustee Tips
5 Things Estate Planners Should Know About Independent Trustees
Part of the practice of estate planning is identifying when clients and their families could benefit from the help of other services and professionals: We see a need and we introduce people - accountants, lawyers, insurance agents, financial advisors, counselors,...
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