July 09, 2021
What is the Role of a Trust Protector?
What is the Role of a Trust Protector?
Attorney and Financial Advisor Chris Berry answer the question regarding What is the role or the function of a Trust Protector?
Estate Attorney and Advisor Chris Berry of Castle Wealth Group answers questions on retirement and estate planning every Wednesday at 1pm. Register via this link or give our office a call at 844-885-4200.
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Episode Transcript
The Function of a Trust Protector
Welcome to Berry’s Bites, please join our host attorney and financial advisor Chris Berry.
The role of a trust protector it’s really defined by the document but typically the reason why we would build trust protectors, we don’t always and we don’t always have to and it’s not required, but it just gives us more flexibility. If trust were to lock down for whatever reason due to incapacity or death and there’s some type of change that should be made, you can have a trust protector appointed which could be the person drafting the document could be someone else.
But typically it’s the person who drafts the documents is named as a trust protector because they’re most familiar with what’s going on. So while you’re alive and well, typically, you can make changes but a lot of times it will become a point or maybe you’ll set up an irrevocable trust where some terms of the trust or provisions are locked down to a certain extent. So by appointing a trust protector rather than having to go to court, we can make whatever changes may be necessary probably the best example where we’ve utilized the role of the trust protector.
This was a number of years ago I had a client’s special needs we set up a special needs trust mom and dad passed away, we had named let’s say Bank of America as the trustee of the special needs trust and then bank of america decided to stop servicing special needs trusts at this level of assets and so rather than having to go to court to appoint say another trustee. We were able to use the trust protector language to administratively make a change to a document that had become irrevocable upon death to appoint another trustee. So we’re able to affect the goals of the planning without having to spend the time effort money of going to court to get those changes made so think of it as just one ability to build in kind of one last chance one last bite of an apple before we would have to go to court to make some changes to documents so it just gives some flexibility it’s not required or necessary in every document but in certain circumstances it typically makes sense.