A. Trust administration and estate administration are very similar in function. At its most basic, trust administration is the process of following the terms laid out in a trust document. This most often takes place after the death of a person who created a revocable living trust. In that context, trust administration involves winding up the deceased person’s final affairs, but without the requirement of a probate court’s supervision.

However, in certain circumstances trust administration can happen while a trust-maker – called the grantor – is still living. Your needs will depend on your circumstances, but we are able to assist with both types of trust administration.

A. When an individual passes away, the family and friends they leave behind have to take certain steps to wind up that person’s final affairs. This period of transition happens for every individual.

Sometimes, that transition is quite simple, especially if the deceased person’s estate was small. Often, though, the transition requires legal, financial, and practical decisions to be made. For someone who made a will, that process is called probate estate administration or just probate. When there’s a trust in place, those decisions are a part of the trust administration.

A. Just like in probate, trust administration has three main tasks or objectives. First, the trustee collects all of the deceased person’s property and prepares an inventory listing what the deceased person owned on their date of death. Second, the trustee pays the deceased person’s remaining debts, if possible. Third, the trustee distributes any remaining assets to the trust beneficiaries, following the trust’s terms.

A. The trustee is the person who is designated in the trust to complete the trust administration by carrying out the provisions of the trust.

The trustee has a variety of duties – obtain tax ID numbers, collect and forward mail, value the assets, pay creditor claims, and file any necessary tax returns, among others – all of which are based on their obligations as a fiduciary to the trust beneficiaries.

A. A fiduciary is a person who has a duty, imposed by law, to act in someone else’s best interest. For example, a trustee is a fiduciary to the each of the individual beneficiaries of the trust they manage as well as to the group of beneficiaries as a whole.

A. Because there is usually no requirement that a trustee report to a court, trust administration costs considerably less than probate. However, while eliminating court costs and the additional work of filing the various necessary pleadings reduces the cost of the administration, the necessary tasks in trust administration are similar or even identical to many of the tasks involved with probate estate administration.

The attorney fees in a trust administration are usually figured based on the value of the assets in the trust. Because every situation is different, these fees sometimes vary, but the work performed by your trust lawyer usually becomes more complicated as the size of the trust increases and the terms become more complicated. Many law offices account for this increasing complexity by charging hourly fees which means the total cost fluctuates depending on the amount of work you ask the lawyer to do. Our process takes the guesswork out of the fee calculation and lets us give you a solid estimate of cost up front. Remember that the cost of any administration depends on your unique situation, so the actual cost of your trust administration will be determined by Ethan as the attorney handling the work.

A. Absolutely! The Iowa Code allows trustees to be compensated for their work because trust administration can be a complicated and difficult process. However, fees earned as the trustee are taxable income, so we often recommend that a trustee not take the fee that they are entitled to if they are also a beneficiary of the trust.