Member-only story
Don’t try to control people after you’re dead
Or while you’re alive, for that matter
I love my grandpa. He’s eighty-six. I have a lot of fond memories involving him, and I still enjoy talking with him. But he made a dick move recently. He set up a dynasty trust for part of the family farm.
Before this went down, I didn’t even know what a dynasty trust was. I thought a dynasty was what you established when you were a Mongolian warlord or some such. Turns out that’s not quite right nowadays.
A dynasty trust is a way to pass inheritance down across multiple generations. Basically it says that each successive generation can benefit from the inheritance, whatever it is, but can’t sell it. So, in my case, the farm land in the trust my grandpa setup will go to my dad, then to me, then to my kids as we all die, and we can’t do anything about it, period.
That’s a really uncool.
First, the lawyers wiggle their way into things and secure what seems at first a nominal fee for “managing” the trust. All “managing” really means is that if any of the trustees try to sell the asset housed in the trust, the lawyers come in and slap them on the hand and tell them “no.” The fees are often annual. So after many years, a law firm stands to reap quite a lot of fee monies for “managing” the dynasty trust.
