What is a Family/Pooled or Pot Trust?

What is the difference for an between an individual trust for your kids or a family trust or pool trust or totten trust? Hi, I'm Guy D. Martino.

I am a Northwest Indiana estate planning and probate lawyer and today I'd like to explain the difference. So, uh, if you have kids, a lot of times you want to leave your monies to them in trust if you should pass away. And so typically a trust as you know or you may not know is like a box.

You take uh your stuff and you put it in the box and then you have a document which says how you want that money spent, how you want that money distributed. So a lot of times when folks have younger children, they might want to have a family trust, a pot trust or another word is a totten trust. So what that does is that goes ahead and pulls all the money in trusts for your minor kids.

And so then the trustee will have direction and how to use the money for the kids. Could be for their health, education, maintenance. It could be specifically for some other things.

And the reason why this might be a little bit of a benefit is that say you have one kid that has more of a need or more special things that need to happen and so you can use the the the family trust so that the actual trustee can use the money as best suited for your kids. And then typically once your youngest kid meets a certain age either 18 or 21 then the trust can go ahead and be separated into two or three or four separate trusts depending upon how many kids you have. So the benefit again of that family or totten trust is that you might have one kid that's going to a uh local school.

You might have another kid that is going to go to a uh private school and it's a a specialized school and you and you want to give the trustee the authority or the discretion to go ahead and help that child that might be going to a different school. Or maybe just the child has more needs than the other child. Some kids are more needy and you want to be able to have the trustee take care of the needy child uh more than the other children.

Sort of like you would do if you were alive. If you have any questions regarding a family or toten trust, you can always reach out to me. I am Guy D.

Martino.