The Beneficiary's Burden: The burden of being a beneficiary of California Wills and Trusts
I have posted many articles on the wrongful acts of bad trustees and I am just getting started on that subject. There is always more to write about.
I can't help but notice that there is a general lack of understanding about the burden of beneficiaries as well. Legally speaking, beneficiaries of California Wills and Trusts do not have any legal obligations or duties to the Will or Trust estate. However, beneficiaries do have a duty that they must undertake to enforce their rights--the duty to take action.
A beneficiary of a California Trust or Will has rights. And an heir of a decedent who is disinherited may have rights, depending on the circumstances. But those rights lie dormant until you choose to make the effort to enforce them. Therefore, every beneficiary has a duty to take action to enforce their rights. No one is going to step in and make your life easy by enforcing your rights for you. You can take the Trust or Will matter to court, but the court's role is supposed to be as a neutral trier of fact and law, it's not there to help you assert your rights--that's your job.
Of course, undertaking to enforce your rights is not easy. It takes time, money and an emotional toll as well. But when you're dealing with a bad trustee or a bad situation, you have little choice but to stand up for yourself.
Many times I hear beneficiaries complain how having this burden to enforce their rights is hard, unfair, and it simply should not be this way. Trustees should do the right thing in the first place or siblings should be fair with trust distributions. Of courses all of those complaints are true and well founded, I agree. But complaining gets you nowhere. You alone have the burden to stand up and enforce your rights. The sooner you as a beneficiary accept this fact, the sooner you can move on and try to get something done.
Comments (2)
Read through and enter the discussion by using the form at the endJoeQ - November 22, 2011 7:24 AM
My 84 year old mother is trustee for my father's estate. He died 11 years ago and his half of the trust became irrevocable. My two brothers and I were successor trustees and beneficiaries. When I learned that as beneficiaries we had rights to an accounting of the trust, something we had never had, and since I had questions about the location of the proceeds from her sale of a warehouse that was part of the trust, I contacted an attorney to ask how to do get an accounting. One of my brothers alerted my mother that I was talking to an attorney and she disinherited both me and my other brother from her half of the trust.
While we have since reconciled and my brother and I have been reinstated as beneficiaries (she made my other brother executor to compensate him for his loss of her entire estate), she has continued to refuse to do an accounting. At one point, claiming she had nothing to hide, she promised to go with me to her attorney and accountant to prove to me that everything was above-board, but quickly changed her mind.
So I've had to choose between asserting my rights as a beneficiary and losing a large part of the estate. At this point, I've chosen not to assert my rights.
Pat E. Cakes - May 2, 2012 8:56 PM
I wish I could tell you what to do. I was the beneficiary of a special needs trust, and one of my brothers was the trustee. He hired an ElderCare company (I was about a decade too young to be considered elderly as defined by state and federal law and I've always been mentally competent) and two women in the firm he hired completely disregarded my civil rights as if I was a brain-dead amoeba. They talked to numerous family members without my knowledge and consent about my medical and financial conditions, which right off the bat constitutes two offenses.
First, they had no authority to bill my trust for something that was for their benefit, not mine, because the special need trust was set up only for the benefit of the beneficiary. Since I had faxed them and emailed them at least three times saying I didn't want their services, and they didn't know what my medical condition was because I didn't tell them or my family, and second, because I am indigent and my special needs trust couldn't afford the rates they lied about (an almost 50 percent increase in hourly rate for one and the other took an increase of several times the year's inflation rate) or for them to do the unwanted, unneeded and ELECTIVE alleged services they wanted to peddle, but no one was sticking up for me but me. My family, an intellectually gifted group, had the mistaken belief they were helping me, when all their involvement did was waste my trust funds and create animosity and turmoil.
You're mother is going to spend what she wants while she's on the face of the earth, and I don't know why she doesn't want you to know about the finances. Maybe she has the feeling that you have no right to criticize her for how she spends money, but there may be a bazillion reasons why she doesn't want you or anyone else to have an accounting.
All I know is that if you don't stand up for your rights, probably no one will. And if you don't stand up for yourself, you may get steamrolled over and before you realize what happened, and the statute of limitations on any kind of remedy may have expired by then.
My family wasted my trust fund talking to the two ElderCare idiots that were out to fill their pockets. They didn't have the expertise with Special Needs Trusts they claimed, and now I have to sue them to just get the flippin' records they've repeatedly refused to provide in violation of federal law.
If you get along well with your mother, maybe you can find a gentle way to ask her why she doesn't want an accounting done or why she doesn't want you to know about the assets and finances of the trust. If you can work it out with her, that would be best. But it may not be worth it to argue about it. We each will be on this face for a limited number of years, and from slightly more than four months involvement almost four years ago with the ElderCare idiots, many of my familial relationships have been maimed and destroyed beyond repair. Do you want to risk that? Can she once again remove you as beneficiary of her half of the trust and create the turmoil all over again?
Can you ask the brother who is executor what's going on? If there is any way you can have your questions or concerns satified peacefully, that's the way to go. I don't know what a lawyer told you about your rights to know about an accounting, but if the word got out that you'd talked to an attorney, someone had to have spilled the beans. Do you know who did? That might make a difference. The word got out that I emailed the local county tax collector about the ElderCare firm just because I had a question about the Public Guardian's responsibilities. But someone in the tax collector's office emailed my email to the ElderCare firm owner, and more dispair and distress affected my family. If the email should have been private, which I was told it would be, then the ElderCare owner should have never been able to read my inquiry which did say derogatory remarks about them.
Contact an attorney in another area and don't tell anyone about it. See what your options are and what each one would involve and then make a decision. You may be forced to decide if it is more important to get an accounting or to keep peace with your mother. I'm not going to give up my rights to my records, and my pursuit of those records in another lawsuit will influence relationships with my family again. However, I will never be able to trust them the way I used to trust them, so I'm not sure it will make a difference. I should have gotten the records years ago. Good luck. I hope you fare better than I did.