Jim O'Day Founder

About Estate Educators

"The Living Trust: A Good Idea Gone Bad?"
The State of California has a plan to control your assets after your death; it’s called probate court. And your boilerplate trust may not save you.

Like many of you, I knew I should have a living trust. My loving wife would occasionally bring the subject up, but I always had something better to do! There would be plenty of time for that later.

My sense of urgency changed several years ago after my mother passed away leaving only a simple will and naming me as the executor.  Her estate was relatively modest but did require filing in probate court under California law. Almost two years and thousands of needless dollars later we were able to close her estate.

After this experience, I agreed with my wife it was time to purchase our own trust. We knew a professional trustee and trust consultant and made an appointment with him to get the process started. Several months later, after signing the final trust documents with our Attorney, my wife and I were relieved. We felt very lucky to know that we were not too late, and that our children would have a much easier time handling our estate than I had handling my mother's.

As I continued to reflect on the process, I was surprised at how much I had learned about trusts. I had heard or read many ads for trusts over the years and they all stressed the primary reasons for establishing a living trust was to avoid probate court and minimize estate taxes. While I had learned these goals were important, I was astonished to learn that many trusts failed to accomplish them! 

As part of my introduction to trusts, our trust consultant had invited me to accompany him on a “field trip” to the Lamoreaux Justice Center in the city of Orange.  Our research started with the 2006 Probate Court case index, 582 pages long, listing literally hundreds of cases involving living trusts. Next we looked at the court documents for a number of individual cases involving nasty battles between families as a result of inadequate trust documents, poor trustee management practices and beneficiaries trying to subvert the intentions of the original documents. One widower wanted the judge to undo the family trust and eliminate the restrictions on the family home.

After this experience I was really concerned about the amount of misinformation in the public domain regarding trusts. Most people don’t even have a trust and many that do have no idea how they really work. There are plenty of people marketing trusts as an easy solution to avoid estate taxes and probate. Unfortunately no one seems to be informing consumers that thousands of trusts will eventually end up in probate or have IRS problems.

I found myself wondering why this huge problem was not in the headline of every newspaper! Consumers needed a basic education on trusts to help them avoid the costly mistakes I had seen. While I was not really looking to change careers, the 30 years I had spent in corporate America had all but burned me out. Had I actually discovered an opportunity to genuinely help people and perhaps even make a buck!  

I decided to invest some time evaluating the market for providing a basic education on trusts to consumers. My idea was to enable consumers to become active participants in the development of their trust rather than settle for a boilerplate document. Consumers needed to become aware that these boilerplate documents might cause their hard earned assets to be squandered on attorney, accounting and probate fees!

I discovered one of the primary reasons so many people put off purchasing a living trust, or purchase a boilerplate document, is they know so little about trusts. Most people do not realize a trust is a consumer product and like any consumer product the quality and price can vary dramatically.

This is why I decided to establish Estate Educators. Estate Educators is working with professionals in the living trust field to develop a series of consumer protection lectures designed to educate the public. We offer these lectures for a fee and they do not include a sales pitch. 

Note: Jim O’Day and his wife Maureen are both California natives and have lived in Fountain Valley since 1976. They raised three children and have two grandchildren. Jim is a graduate of CSULA with a B.S. in Business.