WMH I hope that we will have the time to chat about this after the boot camp.

Successor trustee kick in if the first trust can't perform their duty. If my trustee gets a certified notice, they are directed to turn over trusteeship to the next person on the list - who is in yet another state.......that would make four states.

I do it so it would be rather hard to get a single attorney to sue the trust. Along with successor trustees, you can also assign successor beneficiaries. So you are able to manage from the grave. A third place holder you can have is a director who acts as a property manager if the place is large enough.

Some do's and don't in the world of land trust that make for best practices.

LLCs make excellent beneficiaries. Make a different LLC of yours as the successor.

Trustees should not be you. It should be someone in a different state than where the property is at.

The land trust can be named in any of the 50 states, there are five or six that are a bit better as instead of just case law, their are actual laws on the books.

So your property can be in central NY, the trustee in Ohio and the land trust could be named as Florida.

Your successor trustee is in Maine. The current trustee is allowed only to provide an email contact for the new trustee. Go ahead and try to file against you.

Since the land trust should not be recorded anywhere and the only holder of the document is the LLC, go ahead and start trying to track down people. You end up with an only an email address and eventually six months later a location where the tax bill goes from that trustee. You change the trustee, you are not changing the deed.

Excellent concerns Ken. Why would anyone be the trustee and the beneficiaries? That sorta nullifies many of the reasons to have the trust.

In a land trust the trustee answers to the beneficiaries. The bigger concern should be if the beneficiaries die and you have a dis-honest trustee. The title company would be looking at this closely since the successor beneficiaries are the folks who sign for the trust after the death of the initial beneficiaries.