So your family trust might be rather diverse,but it does not have to be in fact sometimes just one large security account could be the corpus of your South Florida Trust. What happens when your trustee wants to sell a major trust asset are you entitled to a fair valuation prior to sale? See what the Wisconsin appeals court had to say about that.
- Trustees may sometimes be required or wish to submit their activity to the Court for certification that there was no breaches of fiduciary duty this is called petitioning the court.
- Trustees usually have wide discretion to determine what assets to sell, hold and invest and that may not sit well with the beneficiaries of the trust.
- If your father left his company to you in a trust and the trustee said it was wisest to sell the company to highest bidder would you be ok with that? Does your opinion mean anything to the court, or to the trustee?
Wisconsin Court of Appeals says that trust company can sell your trust’s largest assets without seeking a valuation and that its not breach of a fiduciary duty. Check out a quick run down of the courts opinion in the case of In re Gerhard G. Poehling Family Trust , decided April 2, 2015 but not yet published (slip copy – available on Westlaw and Lexis)
- A trust company petitioned the court for approval of the administration of a family trust and among the activities accounted for, the company had sold the trust’s primary asset, a company, without obtaining an independant appraisal of the company’s value.
- The trust’s beneficiaries claimed that it was a breach of the companies fiduciary duty to sell the primary assets (which in this case was a company that is not publicly traded so valuation may be difficult) with a proper valuation. Do you agree? Did the trust company act improperly?
Florida Probate Lawyers know that choosing a trustee is sometimes difficult, often people think that all corporate trustees are the same, but is that really the case? Are Target and Walmart the same? Are toyota and kia the same? Just because something is in the same class as something does not mean they operate identically. Not all trustees are created equal.