The Trustee's Guide An Essential Handbook for Trustees, Beneficiaries, and Ad... - Softcover

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Howard Gross is counsel to Levy & Droney PC of Farmington, CT, and concentrates his law practice primarily on estate and business planning and commercial law. He is a founding member and past president of the Estate and Business Planning Council of Hartford, CT, and has lectured extensively on estate and business planning.

Pierre E. Richards is a retired trust officer and Certified Financial Planner. He has managed various divisions of trust departments for banks in Colorado, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. He was also the manager of Mentor Trust Company, a broker-affiliated trust company that was acquired by First Union National Bank. He now serves as a consultant to the trust industry and specializes in training financial advisors on the responsibilities and uses of trusts.

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This book is a guide for non-professionals. If you join a guided tour through a museum, your guide s purpose is to explain, provide insights, educate and make you more appreciative. In the wilderness, your guide may have the more serious purpose of helping you reach your destiny without being consumed by some large predator. In this book, the purposes are similar. One objective is to give you a working knowledge and appreciation of what being a trustee is all about, including a little history where we think it helps. Another, at least as important, is to alert you to dangers in the path and to help you create effective detours around them, or at the very least to prepare for unavoidable confrontations. We want you to complete your tour of duty as a trustee safely and successfully, and derive some satisfaction in the process.

As our book is intended not for the high priests of the legal temple, but for ordinary mortals, we have tried to make the material easy to digest where we could. We hope that we have done the right thing by sparing you numerous footnotes referencing inaccessible court cases and the like. We have intentionally glossed over nuances, exceptions and legal theories that might be applicable to situations we describe. Where we have had to use legal terms, they are explained in the text as you encounter them, and in a glossary at the back of the book.

We have included a number of legal forms, but they are not meant to encourage you to draft trust instruments. They are there for you to think about rather than copy. We thought, where we include them, that they would be the best way for you to see information that you might need and then share it with an attorney. They might also be helpful to that attorney, too, if he or she is not a specialist in trusts and may not have easy access to such material.

We encourage you to seek the aid of qualified professionals and not rely totally on a mere guide for initiates to the world of trusts. If you have a specific question about your duties as a trustee (or your rights as a beneficiary or duties as an advisor), you should consult an attorney who can answer your question based upon whatever law that applies. This book should condition you to know when it is time to ask for professional assistance, but don t be afraid to err on the side of caution.

This is a "How To Do It" book , but in resistance to a current trend, we have not named it a trustee s guide for "dummies" or "idiots". If you think you are in either of these categories, you better put the book back on the shelf. Trustees must have reasonable intelligence in order to function (other basic attributes are listed in Chapter I, Part One), and they must have a sense about knowing when and where to find qualified advisors. However if, like the main character of Joseph Conrad s Lord Jim, you have "ability in the abstract," you will succeed, however little you know about trusts now.