Reply to Can monetary gifts be given from a trust account?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You need to look at the Trust Agreement. You should also know whether or not the assets in this Trust are subject to the estate tax.

It sounds like the estate is more than $14m. You're a trustee, but you don't know what is in the Trust Agreement.

One thing I've learned from dealing with Trusts etc is that it's REALLY, REALLY unsupervised. There are no guardrails. In a lot of cases, family have to sue each other to enforce the rules. You can bop along doing things wrong for a long time and there is no corporate compliance entity to raise any flags for you.

Because of that, and the size of the estate, and your legal and ethical responsibility as the Trustee, you should really, really consider meeting with a lawyer to go over the Trust Agreement and understand the rules and your responsibilities. Get ahead of it. Make a plan for documenting distributions and reporting to beneficiaries. You'll be really glad you did all this when someone has hard questions, gets divorced, etc etc. [/quote]

Thanks. I'll do that and have reached out to the lawyer who created the trust. I read the trust and think it says gifts are okay but I want someone to check the legalese because the phrasing is not clear to me, a non-lawyer.

The regular bank accounts have my name and sibling names on them (dumb, I know) but these accounts are prob the best ones from which to make the gifts until I can sort out the trust situation with the lawyer.

This all gives me a headache. I never knew a parent becoming incapacitated would require the number of hours I am putting into all of this.

[/quote]

Well, the good thing is this part comes with a lot of money. Having an elderly parent become incapacitated leads to a ton of unpaid admin time for the adult children even if the elder parent is on Medicaid. In many cases more! So count your blessings and get your ducks in a row. Once you have a good understanding of the trust agreement, your responsibilities, how to keep up with the taxes and how to document distributions it might be a low lift going forward. [/quote]

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