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It's common for parents to want to keep their sonsinlaw and daughtersin law out of their estate, for a variety of reasons. Common reasons include the fact that the inlaw spends too much money; the inlaw has their own kids; the inlaw will inherit from their own parents and grandparents; some parents want to keep everything in the "bloodlines" because they inherited from parents and grandparents; others just don't like their inlaws; and others fear that their children will get divorced in the future and lose their inheritance.

Parents have several options when establishing an estate legal program. One option is simply leave the inheritance to the child outright. Some parents reason that an inheritance is the separate property of the child so that should take care of it. However, inheritances that children receive are often, either intentionally or unintentionally, commingled with community property causing the inheritance to lose its separate property status.

A second option parents have is to leave their child's inheritance to a trust for the benefit of the child. If the parents name the child as the trustee, the child's spouse could exert influence over the child and force the child to take excessive distributions from the trust. But some parents tell me, "Let's leave it to a trust for our child and name our child as the trustee. If our child screws it up, so be it. We did what we could do to try to protect him without taking away his access to his inheritance."

A third option is to leave your child's inheritance to a trust, but name a 3rd party as the trustee of the trust in essence restricting your child's access to his or her inheritance. By restricting your child's access to the trust, your are restricting your child's spouse from influencing your child to access the trust. You may even wish to name your child's children as the principal beneficiaries of the trust so that when your child later passes away, remaining trust assets would stay in the bloodlines benefiting your grandchildren. Your child's withdrawal or distribution rights become key components to this program.

There are many factors that play into how you leave an inheritance to your children. You must factor in the community property law, the Trust Code, laws which state that fruits of separate property are community property, family law, marriage contract law, and laws allowing spouses to sign a Declaration reserving the fruits of separate property as separate property.

This post is for informational purposes only and does not provide legal advice. Please do not act or refrain from acting based on anything you read on this site. Using this site or communicating with Rabalais Estate Planning, LLC, through this site does not form an attorney/client relationship.

Paul Rabalais
Estate Planning Attorney
www.RabalaisEstatePlanning.com
Phone: (225) 3292450