Safekeeping
Your Heritage

Establishing a trust can be beneficial for anyone who would like to ensure that their assets are distributed in a specific way to someone or an organization in case of an unexpected life event or transition.  Anyone who has specific estate planning goals including charitable giving, tax reduction or ensuring your assets are protected for future generations will benefit from forming and funding a trust.

A trust reduces the time it takes for beneficiaries to receive their distributions, helps minimize taxes, ensures more privacy upon death, and improves the process of transferring money. It also allows a grantor to provide specific instructions on when and how assets should be distributed.

It’s completely natural to want someone you know and trust to carry out your wishes. But serving as a trustee is more than a gesture of goodwill—it’s a complex legal and fiduciary role with serious responsibilities and personal liability. In fact, most trust disputes arise when individual trustees are overwhelmed by the demands of the role or unintentionally make mistakes. As trustee, the individual is assuming personal liability, which is a significant burden to place on someone who may not have the necessary experience. Unfortunately, we’ve seen the negative consequences resulting in litigation against individual trustees. Individuals may be unaware of the personal liability they assume as trustee.

A corporate trustee brings professional experience, objectivity, and continuity along with the infrastructure to handle the administrative, legal, reporting, and investment-related duties with accuracy and transparency.

At Adelphi Trust, we are devoted experts with over 100 years of combined experience. We are deeply familiar with the statutory requirements and legal and fiduciary responsibilities, as well as the best practices for complex types of trustee roles, such as a trust for a child with special needs. 

As your trustee, we will serve as an objective, conflict-free advisor, ensuring your plan is secure yet agile enough to meet your changing needs, or those of your beneficiaries, throughout your lives and beyond.

The responsibilities of a Trustee include:

-Duty to administer the trust according to the terms

-Duty of loyalty

-Duty to act impartially with all beneficiaries

-Duty to preserve trust properly

-Duty to make trust property productive

-Duty to provide information & principal/income accounting

-Duty to follow the prudent investor rule

-Duty to enforce and defend claims

-Duty to maintain proper records