The Future Of Retirement and The Importance Of The Revocable Trust

As an estate planning attorney, I have had an interesting viewpoint of how the Great Recession affected my estate planning clients. Over the last two or three years, I have noticed a consistent worry of clients during initial conferences. They seem to be more worried in some cases about their children’s ability to retire than their own.

It makes sense. The Great Recession had far reaching effects on our country’s economy and some of those effect are still being felt today. But those with investments, they have not only recovered their nest egg but since increased the size of it handsomely as the stock market has reached all time highs. Retirement age parents, however, are concerned about their children’s student loan debt, costs of housing, delayed family creation and just generally about their well being when they are gone.

I met with a client couple recently who told me that each of their children had graduate degrees from prestigious schools and were now out in the world. One found a job pretty quick since he is in software engineering, but is getting crushed by a $1,500 per month condo rental, plus $1,500 per month in student loans (for the next 30 years). The other child had graduated last year, could not find a job in our area in her chosen field (computer science) and had taken a job as an office assistant at a company in St. Louis. She lives with them.

Each of them told me that they had started watching their spending habits so that they could leave as much of an inheritance to their children as possible, despite their terrific educations and work habits. This is a sea change in estate planning for those with a decent amount of assets to leave to their children.  So what I recommended at the end of our initial conference was a living trust whereby they would each act as the trustees and then when the second spouse had passed away, a successor trustee would take over. In their case, that successor trustee was not their children but a younger brother of the husband.

When the second spouse dies, unlike is often the case in traditional revocable trust planning, the children will not inherit everything. The younger brother will manage the trust for a set number of years at which time the 50/50 split inheritance of each child would be distributed outright. That will be a considerable some based on the couple’s current assets. But the beauty of this delayed distribution is that since the inheritance of each child will not immediately be received it can be invested and grow.

In other words, we are creating a retirement plan for the children via their inheritance. Bills of the children can still be paid as a supplement by the trustee, but the principal remains invested. So upon the death of the second spouse, the balance of any student loans could be paid off but the significant money left can continue to grow. Meanwhile, since the kids have careers starting, they can continue to save for retirement themselves as well. If the inheritance was given to them right away, that may not be the case. The plan we created ensures the kids will have the best of both worlds: A retirement source via inheritance, which will grow from the delay of distribution and the retirement they create for themselves, which should be easier through the assistance of at least some of their bills being paid as needed by the trustee of the revocable trust.

As an aside, I am not a financial advisor but one significant way retirement planning has changed and will continue to change is the loss of guaranteed income. Pensions are largely a thing of the past and workers have to invest more into building a larger nest egg so that they can replace that lost pension check, if necessary, with a draw from the nest egg itself. Many of my clients still enjoy significantly high incomes from combined pensions and Social Security. This can leave their nest egg largely intact. However, their risk tolerance is much lower than someone like their children. This again reinforces the beauty of the plan I outlined above.