The Living Trust Advisor

CHAPTER 19 Using Your Living Trust to Force Your Child into a Conventional Lifestyle Or, If the Twig Is Bent, Will Force Do Anything to Straighten It Out?

Financial Advisor Alert

Much has been made about the “ethical will,” which is a free-form document that expresses the hopes, insights, and concerns by an older generation to its heirs. The principal limitation of ethical wills is their non-binding nature. If your clients have serious concerns about the impact of an inheritance upon their children, then they must go beyond the Ethical Will and adopt an approach that is legally enforceable . . . such as the incentive trust, which is the subject of this chapter.

My father and I used to constantly and facetiously pride ourselves on being the world’s first (and only) father-son lawyers who wrote an inheritance planning book while perched on surfboards at Surfrider Beach in Malibu waiting for waves. No, we didn’t balance laptops on our boards; but we did hatch a lot of the ideas and concepts that eventually became our first book, Beyond the Grave.

During the years that we surfed together, my father and I met several characters who loved and lived the sun-surf-sand lifestyle: Kemo, who lived in a van in the parking lot at Surfrider and sold shirts of his own design; Kathy Zimmerman, whose beach exploits became the inspiration for the series of Gidget movies screen-written by her father; Marty, who ran a marathon on the beach bike path almost every single day.

For me, the most ...