VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Choosing a trustee for your children’s trust is incredibly important. So that’s what we’re gonna discuss today. Are there any guidelines? How do you decide?
I’m Sarah Siedentopf. I’m an estate planning and probate attorney in Atlanta, Georgia. Choosing a trustee for a trust for your children is incredibly important. This is the person who if you’re no longer there is going to decide when they get money, is gonna be paying for their education, making sure that they’re taken of, have clothes, have food, have a car, who’s gonna be making investment decisions to make sure that the money lasts as long as possible, is going to to be making whatever distributions you’ve named in your trust. So what criteria should you be looking at?
The first one really is responsible. The trustee is a long term job, and it is full of responsibility. So we need somebody who can answer the phone, who does what they say they’re going to do, someone whose overall responsible who can talk to CPAs, attorneys, and just generally has things together. Now, specifically, we also want them to be good with money and that doesn’t mean that they have to have a ton of money of their own or that they need to be into investing. They just have to make reasonable decisions and trust professionals when they don’t know the answers. So we do not want someone who has their own high credit card debts, any situation like that, if we can possibly avoid it, because that does lead to a temptation of borrowing trust money, that sort of thing. So good with money.
We would also like someone to the extent possible who has a good relationship with your children. It doesn’t have to be incredibly, incredibly close, but the closer is better because this is a very involved role, but certainly not someone that your child has a significant amount of friction with unless you know the situation and believe that it actually makes sense. There are always exceptions to the role, but in general, we want somebody who your child has a good relationship with. But the biggest, biggest, biggest thing is going to be someone who has a similar set of values to yours.
So somebody that you trust is going to obey your instructions, but also when it comes to a judgment call, make the call that you would have made. And so this is the one I haven’t had anyone come to me recently to make a change because it turned out that the person they had chosen as trustee or other person in their estate plan was irresponsible or bad with money. But recently, I have had multiple people come in to make changes because they realized that they weren’t actually on the same page, didn’t have the same values, weren’t making the same life decisions that the person that they had chosen, and several years ago, they had no idea that they had such different philosophies. So that one really is the biggest one that you want to consider because if you’ve got different philosophies, you’re not gonna be making the same decisions. And you are basically choosing someone to make decisions for your children when you can’t. So an incredibly important role and those are the things that I would consider in it. So thank you very much for watching, and please like and subscribe for more content.
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