Ask 2 Lawyers: What Are Trustees NOT Allowed to do With Trust Assets?

What are trustees not allowed to do with the trust assets well we get this question a lot Keith and has to do with there's some assets that a trustee is taking care of and maybe the trustee is making some questionable decisions with those assets and the beneficiary wants to know what can they do and what can't they do and here they're asking what can't they do with the assets so maybe you could take a staff yeah I mean generally speaking a trustee cannot use the assets for their own purposes so they can't just take it and start spending it you do see that every now and again a trustee will start spending money just for their own reasons or their own purposes the worst of cases or where trustees actually take the money to Vegas and go gambling or whatever that's a definite no-no and the trustee obviously needs to handle the assets within the confines of what the probate code requires so you have to act reasonably you have to do things in the best interest of the beneficiaries but outside of just intentionally misappropriating the trust assets there's a lot of things that the trustee can do with the trust assets and so the list of things they can do is a little bit longer because they can pretty much do anything that they need to on a reasonable basis to manage the trust the state but they can't do anything that benefits themselves that's probably the number one do not do for a trustee would you agree that's right and so I would view this question more as what can trustees do and what they can do is what the probate code allows so the probate code has some very specific provisions about how the trustees to administer a trust and then you go to the four corners of the trust document and you look at the terms there and that also is going to tell you what a trustee can do and by implication can do but ultimately you're correct trustees can't make decisions that benefit themselves at the detriment of the beneficiaries they have to make decisions that are going to benefit all the beneficiaries equally in the trust do a good job for everybody and make a distribution exactly Albertson and Davidson is here to help you fight for your inheritance check out Alda vlog comm for our complete library of helpful illegal videos and articles from your favorite California trust and will litigation law firm Albertson and Davidson LLP.