My father left me an irrevocable trust fund for my benefit with a simple directive to provide for my support. There's no way out of it. The only benefit, I've been told, but not by my actual trust company, is that the money is protected from lawsuits and liens and such. Otherwise it's a huge pain.
In order to get any money I have to fill out and mail in a request form detailing my monthly expenses and my request amount, then wait for approval, and an email from an agent.
My agents, a probate attorney and a financial manager, cannot suggest a safe withdrawal rate, don't offer much advice, and rarely contact me. If I have a question I have to contact them, and if something happens or changes I have to find out by logging into the online access. Boughts and Solds happen regularly with no explanation.
Of course there are the management fees. I inherited other assets and manage them myself including rebalancing, determining a safe withdrawal rate (I asked them to see what they'd say, but have gotten lots of advice elsewhere), buying and selling, tax loss harvesting, and taxes, so I do not require their services, which makes it all the more frustrating to be forced to pay for it.
Then there's the questionable financial advice. I'm in 50/50 stocks/bonds and believe I should be more like 80/20 stocks/bonds, but when I contacted the manager he suggested I move to 35/75 stocks/bonds. One of us is wrong. The recent paper studying long retirements that was just posted the other day concluded that more stocks are better, upwards to 100% for retirements over 40 years.
Finally, it's well past when I'd be done with my taxes but this year thanks to taking distributions from the trust I have to wait for the K1 tax form before I can file. And apparently I'll be waiting right up to April 15th for this tax form every year for the rest of my life. And the only way to determine if the tax form is available is to log in to my account twice a day, every day and click through to see if it's available. There are no email notifications.
Can anyone offer any advice on dealing with all of this frustration? There aren't any rules for how they handle things I can invoke to demand certain treatment, there's nothing I can do about the time frame for the tax form, I'm at their mercy, and I feel like every time I write to one of my agents I'm bothering them and creating an adversarial relationship which will just make things worse and worse.
Submitted March 14, 2017 at 06:09PM by Nivannfisk http://ift.tt/2n7yxjy
