Divvying Up Trustee Duties

Love the way Rachel Emma Silverman of The Wall Street Journal writes about complicated subjects such as trusts and estates. Here's as clear a two-sentence intro to trusts as you're likely to read:

A trust, in its most basic form, is an agreement to hand over your assets to someone else -- the trustee -- who minds the funds or property for your beneficiaries. Depending on how it's structured, a trust can be used for a wide variety of purposes, including avoiding probate proceedings, saving on estate taxes or providing for future generations.

Now why can't banks and trust companies express themselves with such clarity?

Ms. Silverman's subject today (subscription required) is the growing complexity of trusteeship:

Here's how trusts are getting more complex:

• More families are using trusts with teams of multiple trustees or advisers, and some trustees are delegating specific trust assets to outside investment managers.

• Some trusts enlist "trust protectors," who generally have the power to fire and hire trustees.

• Using multiple trustees or advisers may lead to higher fees, state income-tax consequences and legal questions about who is ultimately responsible.

Naming a separate trustee to handle investing is O.K., I guess: "Hope springs eternal." Having a separate decision-maker for discretionary payouts to beneficiaries sounds logical if the administrative trustee is a megabank. (Though the Senior Assistant Blogger is a proud stockholder in Citigroup, he wouldn't expect Citi to provide the equivalent of an old-fashioned, community-bank trust officer.)

Is the slicing and dicing of trusteeship the inevitable wave of the future?