Five Ways to Make Your Trust More Flexible When Creating an Estate Plan. When it comes to estate planning, much of our job is to consider all of the possible life events that could occur in the future. This may include increased wealth, a wedding, a divorce, or a career change—the possibilities are endless. Planning for unknown future events is difficult due to this uncertainty. Fortunately, you can create an estate plan that incorporates enough flexibility to allow your trustee or beneficiaries to adjust to these life events even after you pass away.
Common Options to Increase Flexibility
While there are many options available when creating an estate plan to allow for a reasonable amount of flexibility during trust administration, following are some of the more common:
- Include a provision that allows the trustee to withhold trust assets in the event that your child is going through a divorce.
- Hold your child’s assets in trust, but include provisions that allow a trustee to make distributions for certain specific purposes that are important to you. One example might be if your child found a house in Anaheim that he loves and wants to purchase. The trust can be written so that the trustee can make a distribution to be used towards the purchase.
- Include a provision that allows the trustee to withhold trust assets in the event that your child is going through bankruptcy.
- Consider adding provisions that allow beneficiaries to remove and replace successor trustees if they are not getting along or do not feel that the trustees are doing a good job. This gives your beneficiaries the flexibility to ensure that the trust is run properly.
- Include a provision that allows the trustee to withhold trust assets in the event that a creditor is suing your child.
Five Ways to Make Your Trust More Flexible When Creating an Estate Plan. While this list of estate planning tools is useful, techniques change as time passes. To stay up to date, we encourage you to sign up for our free newsletter today.