If you are a business professional, you understand the challenging process of hiring the best employees to build your team and support your goals.

The process starts with recognizing where help is needed and identifying what needs to be done. That’s followed by a search for the most qualified person. Candidates are reviewed for their skills, training, experience, and availability. If the position involves working with others, communication skills will be considered. If managing money and record keeping are involved, attention to detail and fiscal responsibility are relevant criteria. The process continues until the optimal individual is hired.

Here at CU Trust, we suggest using a similar approach to “staffing” an effective estate plan.

Like a business, there can be several essential roles in most estate plans; Agent Under Durable Power of Attorney, Health Care Agent, Personal Representative, and Successor Trustee are the most common. Each of these has unique duties and responsibilities as defined in the estate plan documents and the state laws on Probate and Trust matters.

Applying a business perspective to estate planning, these roles should be filled with individuals whose skills most closely match the job descriptions. In our experience, however, the reality was that clients frequently used age, sex, and proximity to the principal as the only criteria when naming their trustees. They routinely designated their loved ones and friends as substitute decisions-makers, despite them being unsuitable for those roles.

While many of those designations may have been successful, we don’t always hear about them. (People don’t call their lawyers to report they have no problems.) What we do hear about are the designations that didn’t work out. Situations like the daughter appointed as Health Care Agent who challenged her dying mother’s wishes to decline life support. Or, the nephew, acting as power of attorney, who drained his uncle’s bank account on the way to his funeral. We see children serving as Trustees who ignored the Trust distribution terms and enriched themselves disproportionately. One of the saddest cases was the special needs child who lived with his parents until they died. The parents wanted this son to have their home and sufficient money for a caregiver. A greedy sibling, serving as Trustee, took advantage of poorly drafted legal documents, sold the house, and put his brother in a group home with strangers and no money. There were also cases where beneficiaries with special needs trusts lost their public assistance because their fiduciaries failed to do the required record-keeping and reporting to the government. Many of these cases ended up in Court. They were all difficult to resolve, long and drawn out, expensive, and a source of discord and estrangement among family members…all because the wrong person was designated for a fiduciary role.