How to Train Your Trustee: Dealing with an inexperienced Trustee

It can be difficult to train your Trustee to do the right thing. In this video, we discuss our thoughts on how to help the Trustee do the right thing.

The following is a verbatim transcripts of this video:

If you’re the beneficiary of an irrevocable trust, some amount of money or assets are held in trust for your lifetime or a long period of time, sometimes it can be difficult to work with the trustee to get the distributions to which you are entitled. But, there is a way to go about working with your trustee.

The first step is you have to look at the trust and understand what your distributions rights are. A lot of trusts out there will say that a beneficiary is entitled to distributions for things like health, education, maintenance and support. So that means you should be getting money out of the trust to support you, your rent or a mortgage payment if you have a home. Or if the trust has enough means, the trust should buy you a home. You should be getting proper amounts of furniture, food, medication, dental care. All of these things are just normal maintenance and support. But a lot of times the trustees will decide to be very paternalistic. So that means that you have to stand up for your rights. And the way you do that, is you file a petition in Probate Court and you ask the judge for a number of things. Number one, distribution. So if you have not been getting the proper amount of distributions, you want the court to order the trustee to give you a good amount of distributions. What you should have been receiving. Not just now, but in the past, too. So if you have gone five years and you’ve got virtually nothing out of your trust when you should have been receiving something, you can ask the court to make up for those past distributions, but distributing the money now. You may also want to go for trustee removal if the trustee is being unreasonable and refuses to change their ways in order to help support you.

So you definitely have some rights, but you’re going to have to stand up and enforce those rights. You can’t just keep going along asking the trustee to do the right thing and having the trustee either ignore you or refuse you because that’s going to lead nowhere.

In fact, we have dozens upon dozens of cases that have distribution issues involved in them in some respects. So somebody’s not getting what they should be getting. And keep in mind, it’s the trustee’s duty to come to you and ask you, “Beneficiary, what do you need? What type of support do you need?” So if your trustee is not communicating with you, your trustee’s not asking you those questions, you’ve got a real problem, because that’s a trustee who’s not doing their duty, not living up to their obligations and that means you’re going to have to go to court to hold their feet to the fire.

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