What is An Abused Trust Beneficiary?

[Music] Hi this is Stuart Albertson with Albertson and Davidson and we use this term abused trust beneficiary and we want to talk about what is an abused trust beneficiary we generally see two types of abuse trust beneficiaries in our practice we have those that we call vested trust beneficiaries and non-vested trust beneficiaries so let's talk about the vested type first in this case a beneficiary of a trust has a right to say 1 million dollars from a trust and is in the trust document nobody disagrees that they have the right to that 1 million dollars but for whatever reason the trustee refuses to make the distribution of the 1 million dollars to the beneficiary perhaps the trustee doesn't believe the beneficiary will make wise choices with the money that is theirs under the trust or maybe the trustee wants to use that money for themselves as they go forward in the trust administration or maybe the trustee just wants to be in the power position and give a sibling of there is a hard time that they have bad feelings for there's many reasons why a trustee refuses to make distributions but ultimately if a beneficiary has a right to those distributions and they're not being made that is a abused trust beneficiary that is somebody who has a right to money and someone else saying you know I'm not going to give it to you and I have no legal right to stand on and not giving it to you I'm just refusing to give it to you in that case you general will have to get a lawyer involved the lawyer will ask the trustee to make the distribution on your behalf if the trustee refuses unfortunately you will have to file in the probate court and get the court to order a distribution of those assets so that's the first type of abuse trust beneficiary the second type of abuse trust beneficiary has to do with a non vested beneficiary this is someone who is was a beneficiary of the trust in the past but just before a decedent passed away someone comes along and gets that beneficiary taken out of the trust so same hypothetical in 2015 a mom's says I'm gonna give my three million dollar trust estate to my three children in equal shares meaning one of those children each get 1 million dollars each in that case if one of those beneficiaries is written out of the trust two weeks before mom dies and their million dollars disappears under the new amendment to the trust that is an abused trust beneficiary if mom didn't intend that if exercise of undue influence was taken over mom in order to get her to do that then that trust beneficiary will have to more than likely file a petition to invalidate the amendment what that was created that removed them from the trust so those are generally the two categories of abused trust beneficiaries that we see in California if you think you fall into one of these categories more than likely you're gonna need a lawyer's help to understand your rights and then once you understand those rights decide on how you want to move forward to protect the interest that you may have and across [Music] [Applause] you.