If you are entitled to receive money from your Trust, and you have received nothing or very little, then that's a good sign you are being abused. In this video, we discuss this type of Trustee abuse and what you can do about it.

The following is a verbatim video transcript:

If you’re the beneficiary of an irrevocable trust, it’s possible that you are being abused by your trustee. And it’s very easy for me to tell when I talk to potential clients if they’re in a position where they’re being abuse because I look at the distribution standards of the trust. So your trust will have a section that talks about distribution of income and principal. And it could say that income’s supposed to go to on a regular basis, or it could be that income and principal is supposed to be distributed to you based on what we call a HEMS standard. That means, Health, Education, Maintenance and Support. And so my first question when I see those type of distribution standards is, “What have you received?”, “How much money has the trustee given you?” And if the answer is zero or very little, then I know that we have an abuse situation on our hands. This is a trustee who either doesn’t understand what the distribution requirements are or simply doesn’t care and is ignoring the distribution requirements. And the more money that’s in the trust, the more I would expect to have reasonable distributions.

So, for example, if you have a trust that has two million dollars’ worth of assets and over the last five years, you’ve been distributed maybe $50,000. That’s a huge red flag! That’s a problem! There’s no way that you probably only had $50,000 worth of maintenance and support payments due you over a five-year period form a pool of two million dollars. There’s just something wrong there. It doesn’t pay the smell test.

Now if it’s a smaller trust. Let’s say you have a half a million dollars in trust for your benefit, and over the last five years, you’ve received $5,000, that also doesn’t pass the smell test. Because that’s just too small of an amount based on what any normal person’s needs would have to be over five years. I mean, you don’t have to be somebody who lives extravagantly to need more than $5,000 over five years. That just stands to reason.

So what we are looking for is how much is in the trust and how much have you received? And when those two numbers don’t make sense, that’s when we know we have an abuse situation.

Now, if you have a trust that has two million and over the last five years, you’ve received a million, ok, now we’re getting into something that, you know, might actually have been an overly generous distribution. I don’t know. We’d have to look at it. But it doesn’t sound terrible.

So the lower the amount of distributions that you’ve received as the beneficiary, the bigger the problem. And the thing that always interests me is when people call in to me and say, “Well, I’m a beneficiary of a trust. There’s two million dollars in this trust.” And I ask, “Well, how much have you received?” “Oh, over the last three years, I’ve received $25,000.” And then the question is, “That doesn’t seem right to me.” That’s what they ask me. “That doesn’t seem right to me. Is it right?” No, of course it’s not right. You know, your instincts are correct. If you think that you should be getting more than $25,000 from a trust of two million, you are correct. You should be.

Then the question becomes, ok, well, how are we going to fix this? Well, we’re probably going to have to go to court. And we’re going to have to ask the judge to make a distribution to you, not just for what you’re missing now, but for all the past distributions you should have received and you didn’t. And we call those “make-up distributions”. We want to make up for all the past distributions you didn’t receive. We may also go for trustee removal and things like that. But it’s the distributions that I really focus on the most because that is what’s going to help you as a beneficiary. And once you have the money in your hands, you can manage it any way you want. So once we take money out of the hands of the trustee, we don’t have to worry about how the trustee manages it.

So we focus on the distributions. We focus on what are your distribution rights? What should you be receiving? And then we look at you actually received and that tells the story. And you can tell pretty quickly when a beneficiary is being abused by the trustee of an irrevocable trust.

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