For 30 years, a large regional bank in the Southeast managed a
multimillion-dollar family trust for Robert, a 54-year-old retired marketing
executive in Alabama. As different trust officers came and went, Robert began
noticing bothersome changes. The newest trust officer had “an uppity attitude,
and she was never in her office,” he says. “I always got voice mail.” Robert,
who spoke to Worth on the condition of anonymity, chafed at having his trust’s
assets invested in blue-chip stocks and in the bank’s own mutual funds. “I
needed someone to help me with real financial planning,” he says. “I think my
needs were beyond their abilities.”
 Luckily, the provisions of his trust, which had
been set up for him by his father and his uncle and aunt, allowed him to replace
the trustees who managed it. That is exactly what he did. Last fall, Robert
designated a small financial advisory firm, Charles D. Haines in Birmingham,
Ala., to oversee the trust. Now, he says, “it’s invested more aggressively to
meet my needs.”
The kind of frustration that Robert felt with the trustee overseeing his
money is fairly common. “There’s a natural resentment of somebody managing money
we think should be ours,” says Richard Kahn, a trust attorney and partner at the
Florham Park, N.J., law firm Pitney Hardin. “Probably in 25 percent of cases,
there’s somebody that [trust beneficiaries] would like to be able to fire,
whether they can or not.”
Many trust beneficiaries do in fact feel
they cannot make the leap from frustration to termination for various reasons,
says Wil Heupel, a coprincipal at Accredited Investors, a wealth management
company in Edina, Minn. “Individuals often do not actually fire their trustees
because of the hassle and the cost involved, and feelings of uncertainty over
whether they could actually succeed at it.”
Yet, beneficiaries can take control of their family trusts, either by
replacing trustees or, at least, by redefining their working relationships with
them. In fact, exerting control over a family trust by replacing a trustee can
be relatively painless, depending on its provisions and the laws of the state of
residence. For example, if the trustee in question is an institution, a simple
request for change may suffice.
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