Pest Control…How Hard is it to Remove Your California Trustee?

[Music] Hi this is Stuart Albertson with Albertson and Davidson and the question is can a trustee be removed as trustee of a trust and the answer is yes but with a caveat it is difficult in the American system which includes California to remove a trustee you must have an evidentiary hearing in most cases to remove a trustee meaning you're gonna have a trial so it's gonna take time to remove a trustee beneficiaries get very frustrated with this because they think that once the trustee does something that's somewhat questionable with the trust assets that they should automatically be removed or that it should be easy to remove them and unfortunately under California law it is not easy to remove them you can request that the court remove them and the court will set a trial date which is usually way into the future where then you can have evidence put on to show why the trustee should be removed there is one other way that you can get a trustee out perhaps when they're doing bad things to the trust that's not a removal it's a suspension it's something that the court can do on its own motion or on the motion of you as a beneficiary of the trust but even then you're gonna have to come in with some pretty compelling evidence right up front to get a judge to suspend a trustee pending the outcome of the trial to ultimately remove them that will happen much later down the road so the short answer is you can get trustees removed but it's gonna take time and most beneficiaries feel that there's not time because the trustee in their mind is abusing the trust assets by failing to make trust distributions using the trust assets for themselves making distributions to themselves it's a very frustrating place to be there's some other mechanisms we can use to address that type of behavior but as far as removal goes it can be done but it's not easy.[Music] [Applause] [Music]