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Selecting a Trustee

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A corporate professional trustee will most likely assign a Trust Officer to manage your trust account on a daily basis. He or she is skilled in dealing with legal, tax and administrative matters and employs the infrastructure and skills of other members of the trust organization to continuously manage and monitor the trust. A corporate trustee handles matters on a regular basis and is well equipped to handle the day-to-day affairs of a trust. An individual trustee is likely to be less financially solvent than a corporate trustee and may lack significant assets that the beneficiaries could reach to remedy a breach of fiduciary duty. A corporate trustee handles fiduciary matters on a regular basis and is well equipped to handle the day- to- day affairs of a trust (e.g., investment management, accounting, record- keeping, allocation of receipts and expenditures between principal and income, determining the tax basis of property, filing tax returns, etc.). In addition, the corporate trustee has the capability and infrastructure to provide certain services without additional cost to the estate, such as providing investment management services, handling legal and accounting issues, and consulting on tax-sensitive investment and other tax issues. Corporate trustees impose fees for providing fiduciary services. However, the fee is usually a reasonable expense for the expertise, objectivity and accountability that the corporate trustee brings to the job. Individual trustees will be required to engage legal, investment, tax and accounting professionals to properly manage a trust, thus incurring equivalent expense. Finally, if the individual trustee is a family member, there may be increased family strife and conflict-of- interest concerns. The family member who serves as trustee could see his or her family relationship destroyed because of arguments over favoritism. You may not want to place a surviving spouse (especially in a second marriage) in the position of playing favorites among the children or force a child to make decisions regarding the child's siblings. On the other hand, corporate trustees are often viewed as impersonal because they lack the personal knowledge of family history, unique family assets, and the family member beneficiaries that a family member or friend as trustee could bring to the job. Accordingly, corporate trustees may lack the insight necessary to give adequate attention to the specific facts of each trust. Alternately, you may be seeking an impersonal approach. A corporate trustee is able to make unbiased decisions when beneficiaries of a trust make demands for distributions or investment strategies that favor income beneficiaries at the expense of growth of principal for future beneficiaries. Corporate trustees are unencumbered by feelings of family loyalty and sympathy that could prevent a family member trustee from making an objective decision. 2

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