Trust Administration
Protect and preserve the legacy you have spent a lifetime creating.
A PROFESSIONAL TRUSTEE CAN HELP PRESERVE YOUR LEGACY
When it comes to estate planning, creating a trust is often an important aspect to ensure that your assets are managed and distributed according to your objectives.
Trusts can help accomplish a wide variety of goals like overseeing the long-term care for a loved one, protecting assets from creditors, decreasing your taxable estate, passing wealth to future generations, securing assets in a transaction, or providing for a favorite charity.
Carefully choose your trustee
Trusts can be complex legal documents that can last for generations and involve complicated legal and investment decisions.
The more complicated your financial situation, trust documents, and the longer the term of your trust, the more you could benefit from a corporate trustee providing professional trustee services.
When you appoint AMG as sole or co-trustee on your trust, we can provide the extensive resources of a national trust bank, including
- Family Education & Guidance. We help your family and other beneficiaries understand the purpose of your trust, the trust document terms, and ways to use distributions to thrive — potentially generations into the future.
- Trust Reporting Compliance & Liability Management. As a highly regulated national trust bank with rigorous internal practices and compliance procedures, we can provide processes and procedures to help lower co-trustee personal fiduciary liability risk.
- Recordkeeping, Bill Pay & Tax Filing. We handle the complexities of income and principal allocations, provide transparent and regular statements, provide court accountings, manage potential family conflicts, manage requests for distributions from beneficiaries, receive and pay bills, and help to prepare trust tax returns.
- Discretionary Investment Management. We develop an investment strategy for trust assets — including non-marketable assets — and actively manage them through changing market conditions. Learn more about AMG’s investment approach.
Why Appoint AMG as Trustee?
- Maintain continuity of trust execution for generations
- Lower the likelihood of future family conflict
- Lower or eliminate personal fiduciary liability
- Outsource active management of trust assets
- Save time keeping records and preparing required communications and tax filings
— Jennifer, Trust client
— John & Anne, Trust clients
SELECTING A TRUST FOR YOUR SITUATION
AMG administers many different types of trusts used for a variety of purposes, including the examples below. We can help you evaluate the pros and cons of each type of trust based on your objectives and work with your estate attorney to draw up the appropriate documents. Our spearheading the dialogue can often save you on attorney fees.
Manage Taxes
Protect Credit
Plan Giving
Support Needs
TRUST ADMINISTRATION
AMG as sole or co-trustee provides you and your beneficiaries the experienced staff and the necessary resources to deliver appropriate trust administration and investment management services — potentially for generations.
PROFESSIONAL TRUSTEE SERVICES
- Provides experienced trust officer and support staff to administer trusts
- Invests and monitors trust assets according to trust document direction
- Safe-keeps trust assets
- Accounts for all transactions
- Makes appropriate distributions in accordance with trust document
- Facilitates the preparation and filing of trust tax returns*
- For special needs or disability trusts or guardian/conservator of property, helps oversee professional case managers, caregivers and other professionals
- For trust-owned life insurance policies, helps maintain tax compliance, coordinates or pays premiums, and collects death benefits
Advantages of APPOINTING a Corporate Trustee
Specialized experience and expertise
A corporate trustee has the resources and knowledge to properly administer a variety of types of trusts according to their terms, with expertise in ever-changing tax, accounting, legal, and investment best practices and laws. Our trust officers are experienced and receive ongoing continuing education to stay at the forefront of industry changes. They are also skilled at counseling grantors and beneficiaries to improve family dynamics across generations.
Time savings
There are many duties, responsibilities and potential pitfalls that come with being a trustee, so it is important to consider them thoroughly. Serving as a trustee includes a significant number of time-consuming responsibilities including investing and monitoring marketable securities and other assets, making payments, hiring third parties, making sure tax returns are prepared, keeping required records, and writing communications.
Liability management
Acting as a trust’s fiduciary may involve potential liability. Using a corporate trustee instead keeps you from having that liability. At AMG, we have ongoing staff training, established best practices, and rigorous monitoring of adherence to compliance procedures. For example, large discretionary distributions require approval by the firm’s trust committee, comprised of the firm’s trust officers.
Discretion and objectivity
On occasion, trust beneficiaries may request distributions that are not appropriate under the terms of the trust. Telling a family member “no” can potentially create disharmony. Not saying “no” could cause trustee liabilities. A corporate trustee is a neutral third party able to make and deliver unpopular decisions.
Long-term trust management
There are many life changes that can occur to make trust administration by any one person difficult over the long term, especially if the terms of the trust extend across multiple generations. A corporate trustee can provide continuity in administering a trust for its full term.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
WHY APPOINT A TRUST COMPANY AS TRUSTEE?
When estate planning, it can be helpful to appoint a trust company as trustee as they tend to have the skills and resources to execute the terms of trust documents, act as a fiduciary in managing trust assets, and provide continuity in trust administration across generations. A neutral third party, like a corporate trustee, can also help avoid family conflicts that may arise if one of several beneficiaries is appointed as trustee.
WHAT IS INCLUDED IN THE FEE FOR TRUST ADMINISTRATION SERVICES?
AMG’s Professional Trustee Services fee includes the investment and management of trust assets, asset custody and safekeeping, transparent accounting of all transactions to interested parties, bill payment, the management of insurance policies, facilitating the preparation and filing of trust tax returns, and, in the case of special needs trusts, coordinating among caregivers regarding beneficiary financial issues.
The fee for services is billed based on the complexity of the trust and the market value of investable assets.
DOES AMG ACT AS A FIDUCIARY?
AMG acts in various fiduciary capacities depending on the services being provided. In general, AMG provides a high level of advice to our clients on a fee-only basis. AMG advisors do not sell products nor receive any transaction-related commissions. We put our clients’ interests first.
HOW IS AMG NATIONAL TRUST REGULATED?
AMG National Trust is chartered by, and subject to the regulatory oversight of, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC, a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks and federal savings associations. The OCC has extensive rules and regulations with which banks must comply. It supervises banks regarding all aspects of a bank’s operations, including fiduciary responsibility.
AMG must also comply with all relevant Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) requirements. Additionally, AMG’s parent company, AMG National Corp., is a financial holding company subject to supervision and examination by the Federal Reserve Board.
SAFEGUARD YOUR LEGACY TODAY
Learn more about trust and estate planning as part of an integrated wealth management strategy or how to engage our Trust Administration services.