The Living Trust Advisor

Condon does not mince words about the less-than-noble, destructive or just misguided behavior he has seen as an estate planning lawyer. One chapter is entitled, “Do Not Leave Your Child An Outright Inheritance (I’m Not Kidding!),’’ and he’s so insistent on this advice, he reiterates this exhortation in a Financial Advisor Alert.

Why so adamant?

“The money will be lost to the problems your children face in their lives,’’ he says, these problems including divorce, remarriage, income tax trouble, addiction, financial immaturity, creditors, mismanagement, bankruptcy and more. This is money that clients intended not just for their children but, he argues, often more so for their grandchildren. It must be protected and can be through so-called protection trusts. Condon outlines four such trusts in ascending order of austerity, beginning with the transparent trust (a “constant reminder of your wish to keep the family assets in the family’’) to the discretionary trust, which appoints a third party to distribute, or not, living trust assets to survivor children.

Here, Condon says, financial advisors must step in and “point out to your clients that their assets will one day be in their children’s hands and they have to take protective measures now in their living trust to ensure that those assets don’t slip through those hands.’’

In Condon’s eye-opening last chapter of true stories drawn from his law practice, “A Random Sampling of Cautionary Tales,’’ horror stories abound when a living trust has not been properly crafted: squabbles over equitable distribution of living trust assets destroy sibling and parent-child relationships; failure to update living trusts gives inheritance rights to the wrong person; ill-considered trusts have damaging effects on heirs; and elderly widows and widowers are forced out of homes not titled properly to a living trust.

Condon invites readers with questions to contact him, at no charge, and includes in his book his postal and email addresses, plus telephone numbers.
 
The Living Trust Advisor, second edition, by Jeffrey L. Condon. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.  $39.95

Eleanor O’Sullivan is an award-winning freelance journalist who writes for Financial Advisor magazine.