Estate & Trust Administration For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Introduction

This country is aging. Fewer babies are being born, and people are living longer and longer. They’re also managing to accumulate more and more wealth. Wealth is relative; two generations ago, a middle-income family owned a house and maybe a car and perhaps even had a little money in the bank. Today, that scenario has become much more complicated. Many who would never consider themselves wealthy now own more than one home and have investments in the stock market, retirement accounts that continue on after death, and debt up to their eyeballs.

With this increased complexity in financial affairs comes a parallel complexity in transferring all these accumulated assets to the next generation(s), either at death or before. In the past, heavy-duty trusts were only for the very wealthy; today, they’ve become part of the legal landscape for ordinary Americans. And because ours is a do-it-yourself society in so many aspects, that I-can-do-it-myself attitude has carried over into trust and estate administration. Why, many people ask, should they pay someone else to do work that they themselves can perform just as well for a fraction of the cost?

And that’s why we wrote the second edition of this book. Between the two of us, we have more than 60 years of estate and trust administration experience. In that time, we’ve come across some unusual situations in our careers and devised ways to avoid standard pitfalls that await the unwary. We wrote this book to share with you some ...