April 2021 Newsletter

Daniel Petrov was born in Odessa, Ukraine. He and his family moved to Southern California in 1989 and he has been a Southern Californian ever since. During law school, Daniel interned with an estate planning law firm where he enjoyed working with large and small estates. After law school, he worked for a prestigious North County San Diego Personal Injury Firm representing injured parties. Daniel started his practice in 2014 and has since litigated high profile personal injury and wrongful death cases.

Daniel joined Hilmoe, Bertier & Marrero, LLP in 2019 as Of Counsel with a focus on wrongful death, personal injury, and estate planning matters. The team at Hilmoe, Bertier & Marrero, LLP is proud to have Daniel on our team and we look forward to helping California families with their personal injury and wrongful death matters.

by Ted Bertier, Esq.

If you are familiar with wine, you know the purpose of decanting is to transfer wine from one container to another in order in order to aerate it and, most importantly, leave the sediment behind.  It turns out some trusts need to be decanted too.

Once the owner of a trust dies or becomes incapacitated, most trusts become irrevocable and can no longer be changed.  Unfortunately, there may be provisions of that trust that worked just fine when it was created but several years (and changes in tax law) later, those provisions can start causing problems that interfere with the intended purpose of the trust.

For example, many older marital trusts require the surviving spouse to split the trust into two “subtrusts” when the first spouse dies.  At least one of those subtrusts is usually going to be irrevocable and will contain provisions the surviving spouse cannot change even if they want to such as the trustees or beneficiaries.  Now the survivor has a trust they do not want and must pay to administrate.  The solution?  Decant that trust!

While trust decanting has been possible in many other states for decades, California finally began allowing it a few years ago.  The decanting process allows you to transfer assets from the trust you no longer want into a new trust, leaving behind all the unwanted provisions like sediment in a wine bottle.  Before you get too excited and rush out to decant every trust you do not like, you need to know not all trusts can be decanted and there are specific rules for doing so.

Contact HBM and we can evaluate your situation to see if we can help you.