The Legal Eagle – The Trouble With Trusts

Estate planning, particularly the use of trusts, dominated Monday's Legal Eagle show on KROC-AM. 

David Shulman made his monthly visit to the radio station to join Andy Brownell for Rochester Today and spent the hour fielding questions from listeners, particularly those with estate planning issues.

Most of the questions involved trusts. David always likes to point out that lawyers love trusts, and while they can be very useful in estate planning, setting them up can be a costly proposition. They can also become a major headache if they are not properly established and/or administered.

One of the callers to the Legal Eagle was heading to California in a few weeks to assist his mother fix issues with a trust set up by his father, who had developed dementia and is no longer competent to handle their financial affairs. Unfortunately, his father had put some major assets under his sole control and failed to place those assets in a trust that he had established decades ago, leaving the spouse in a difficult situation.

Shulman's response was informative and used terminology that the average person could understand, something David likes to call "parting the purple curtain."

Click on the play button below to listen to the show.