If you work with elderly clients, you may have heard them say this: "If you put me in a home, I will disinherit you." This sentence rang in my head ever since I started to practice law in 1992. Every time I met with clients, I asked myself, what would I do for them if they were my parents.
From that one statement, my partners and I created the BestatHomeTrust TM. The BestatHomeTrust TM isn't any kind of trust, it is a trust which has its primary purpose in keeping the settlors or grantors of the trust where they want to live, their own home. We worked many days to build suitable and flexible language for our clients who wanted many things taken care of by their trustees. We tested and tested and tested the language to arrive at many typical goals of the clients which we had developed over sixteen years. Next, we presented the trust to an army of local attorneys to critique and comment on the trust for functionality and ease of use. Here are some of the basics of the BestatHomeTrust TM goals:
1. Keeping the settlors in their home.
2. Conditional distributions based on tangible identified personal efforts to keep the settlors in their home.
3. Conditional payments to trustees based on their efforts to keep the settlors in their home.
4. Professional trustee terms which would work with local PFAC members expectations.
5. Defined terms of what the settlors' expectations are and all the occasions where the settlors agreed or disagreed to placement outside of their home.
We found that most people lived longer and healthier lives when they lived in their own home until death. More importantly, the expectation of the client had to be balanced by the financial means of keeping them in their home with superb care. Finally, the client would be able to delegate different duties to different trustees to enable the trust to function both in intent and in financial goals.
If you are an attorney, feel free to call us or to license this trust and presentation material from us for your seminars and presentations.
Mina N. Sirkin is a Family Wealth Lawyer in Los Angeles, California. Ms. Sirkin is Board Certified as a Specialist in Estate Planning Probate and Trust Law by the State Bar of California. [email protected]. http://www.SirkinLaw.com. 818-340-4479.
