Nine out of ten times a client brings me a trust to review, the trustee named inside it is simply the oldest child. Not the most organized child, or the one who actually enjoys paperwork. The oldest. It is an understandable habit and a costly one: an executor finishes in a couple of years, while a trustee can serve for twenty. That is why I advise clients to stop picturing the signing day and start picturing the decade that follows.
Year One Is the Easy Part
In the first year, the trustee mostly gathers. Accounts get retitled, a fiduciary income tax return gets filed, beneficiaries are cooperative because the loss is fresh. Almost anyone can manage year one. Nobody should be chosen based on it.
Year Five: When the Two-Family House Becomes the Job
So much wealth in Maspeth, Ridgewood, and Woodside sits inside a two-family house, and a house inside a trust is a small business. There is a tenant, a boiler, an insurance renewal, a property tax bill, and a decision about whether to sell when one beneficiary needs cash and another wants to hold. Your trustee will be making that call alone, in writing, and defending it later. Someone who avoids conflict and dislikes recordkeeping is the wrong person, however much you love them.
Year Ten: The Relative Who Cannot Be Told No
Trust documents usually give the trustee discretion over distributions for health, education, and support. Discretion means saying no sometimes. I ask clients plainly whether the person they have in mind can refuse a request from a brother, a sister-in-law, or a nephew and still show up at Thanksgiving. If the honest answer is no, that is a reason to consider an independent or corporate trustee for distributions, or to write firmer standards into the document. That is the heart of vetting and naming the right trustee rather than filling in a blank.
The Year Your Trustee Cannot Serve
People move to Florida, get sick, or pass away first. Without a named successor, an interested party has to petition the Queens County Surrogate’s Court in Jamaica to appoint someone, which is slow, public, and avoidable. I draft at least one successor trustee and usually two, plus a method for naming more.
Co-Trustees Need a Tiebreaker
Naming two children together so neither feels passed over is the most common instinct I see in Elmhurst and Middle Village families, and one of the most expensive. Co-trustees generally must act together, so a single disagreement can freeze a trust exactly when a beneficiary needs money. If you name two, the document must say in advance how a deadlock is broken.
My office sits on Union Turnpike in Kew Gardens Hills, a short drive from these neighborhoods, and I have reviewed many trusts drafted years earlier by someone who never asked these questions.
Contributed by Roman Aminov, Esq, a Queens estate attorney in New York City.
Roman Aminov Estate Law firm of Queens
147-17 Union Tpke, Kew Gardens Hills, NY 11367, United States
P59P+93 Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, NY, USA
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