Jun 25, 2026 · 15 min · 8 segments
Brent chats about the always challenging decision of who should be your trustee. He explains the options, the pluses and minuses to each, and how the role of a trustee need not be an all or nothing…
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I wanted to talk about an important topic today.
This is something that comes up constantly, constantly.
It's just never-ending.
And that is how to choose a good trustee.
Oh, the magic.
Oh, the sorcery of choosing a good trustee.
It's so difficult.
And look, I have a lot of friends who work at corporate trustee offices, and they would probably say, no, it's not so difficult.
You just name us trustee.
as the trustee and that solves all the problems.
And maybe it does in the right circumstances.
So we're gonna dig into that just a little bit.
But this, I mean, this is a persistent issue and it doesn't necessarily have to be limited to trustees.
I'm gonna use the trust context as the foil here, even though you could say the same thing for things like executors and wills and agents and powers of attorney.
and managers of LLCs, and general partners of partnerships, and presidents of corporations, etc., etc., etc.
So there's a lot of the stuff that I'm going to mention about trustees that is relevant to many of those contexts, but just remember...
And this is not limited solely to trust some of this, some of these comments.
So hopefully that will be obvious, but all right.
So, I mean, really the world is divided into two categories of trustees, which I'm sure you're very aware of net that is individuals.
and corporate trustees.
It's just, if it were so simple, I could end the podcast now, but it is not because it really is more nuanced than that.
Because within each category, there are many, many, many subcategories that you really have to consider of individuals.
Of course, you can name Uh, immediate family members, um, easy on the list are people like spouses and kids.
They seem to get named the most.
They're the most trusted, uh, people in many cases, but of course you can have aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews and parents even, and I've seen grandparents, uh, and not random strangers, but people who are not related like friends and acquaintances, professionals, trusted professionals, like financial advisors if they're permitted to do it.
I wanted to talk about an important topic today.
This is something that comes up constantly, constantly.
It's just never-ending.
And that is how to choose a good trustee.
Oh, the magic.
Oh, the sorcery of choosing a good trustee.
It's so difficult.
And look, I have a lot of friends who work at corporate trustee offices, and they would probably say, no, it's not so difficult.
You just name us trustee.
as the trustee and that solves all the problems.
And maybe it does in the right circumstances.
So we're gonna dig into that just a little bit.
But this, I mean, this is a persistent issue and it doesn't necessarily have to be limited to trustees.
I'm gonna use the trust context as the foil here, even though you could say the same thing for things like executors and wills and agents and powers of attorney.
and managers of LLCs, and general partners of partnerships, and presidents of corporations, etc., etc., etc.
So there's a lot of the stuff that I'm going to mention about trustees that is relevant to many of those contexts, but just remember...
And this is not limited solely to trust some of this, some of these comments.
So hopefully that will be obvious, but all right.
So, I mean, really the world is divided into two categories of trustees, which I'm sure you're very aware of net that is individuals.
and corporate trustees.
It's just, if it were so simple, I could end the podcast now, but it is not because it really is more nuanced than that.
Because within each category, there are many, many, many subcategories that you really have to consider of individuals.
Of course, you can name Uh, immediate family members, um, easy on the list are people like spouses and kids.
They seem to get named the most.
They're the most trusted, uh, people in many cases, but of course you can have aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews and parents even, and I've seen grandparents, uh, and not random strangers, but people who are not related like friends and acquaintances, professionals, trusted professionals, like financial advisors if they're permitted to do it.
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