How should an inheritance be structured?
Our answers are as varied as our families and our charitable interests. The point has already been made that if children are not yet old or experienced enough to be entrusted with direct stewardship of their own inheritance, their inheritance should be in the form of a trust, and their access to those funds would be through the approval of the trustee you have selected to manage those funds. Once children reach an age of financial maturity, the traditional thing to do is to terminate the trust and give the assets directly to the children, usually in three increments. Increasingly, however, families are finding it inappropriate to give all of the children’s inheritance as an outright gift of capital. Supporting that idea, a recent study indicates that the average outright inheritance is spent within eighteen months of its receipt. Sometimes, parents are concerned that children may not have the financial wisdom to manage capital wisely, so they choose to leave all or part of the inherita
