Dealing with terminal cancer and lots of strong chemo treatment I took care of him 24/7. He was not able to drive and walking required cane due to spread of a cancer to his hip bones. Multiple times required my attention at night time.
The house in the Trust and his oldest daughter, 33 yo, is requesting rent (for her 35% of the house) from me and our minor daughter until trust is closed.
I am the trustee for his Trust and took 24/7 care of him not being able to be employed for his 9 months of suffering.
Can I ask the Trust for the compensation as being his caregiver?
If I wouldn't have done this we would need to hire someone to help him with bath, diapers, medications, food, vital control, constipation food, blood sugar monitoring, insulin administration, driving him to doctors and treatment, chemo side effects,medical bills, enrolling him for medical insurance supplement and many more!
I think I should be entitle for some reimbursment as a caregiver while she is asking for rent and never ever came to help her father!
How ridiculous can be to ask rent from your minor sister?
I have a question. What did he leave YOU? If nothing, I would refuse to act as Trustee. It is a difficult job. Why do it with everything left to the daughter. As to the daughter, unless YOU as Trustee have already distributed the Trust to her, the home is not yet hers. It belongs to the Trust and you are Trustee of the Trust. You do not have to give her a thing. She is not involved other than to be a beneficiary of a Trust that is not yet distributed to her.
See a Lawyer if you choose to act as Trustee. With the daughter out there drooling over her future home already, you cannot afford to make mistakes.
As to the question of whether or not you can be paid NOW out of his Trust or any other way, the answer is NO. A dead person cannot make a deal to pay for care. It is too late for that. The fact you question this makes me know that you must contact a Trust and Estate Lawyer now. There is too much you do not understand about your duties as Trustee to do this alone.
Wishing you good luck. I myself would refuse to accept being Trustee of Trust. If you already HAVE then it is too late to refuse. Once accepting that duty it is impossible to resign without agreement of beneficiaries.
I hope that your fiance left you with funds; if not, I guess it is an awful lesson about living without legal rights as a spouse for two decades, and caring for someone who did not care back.
I wish you good luck going forward, and I am so sorry for your loss.
Im trying to figure out why someone with only 35% interest is asking for rent. So who’s the other 65% of the Trust?
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How is the Trust being supported financially?
By this I’m asking does the Trust have assets titled into the trusts name - like stocks or other investments or opened with serious $$$ put into the Trust initially - that regularly provide income to “feed” the Trust and at a high enough level to pay all costs of everything that is in the name of the Trust? And likely $$$ available for years if not decades.
That house has all sorts of costs..... from property taxes to insurance to maintenance. The house is in the name of the Trust, so Trust should have $$$$ to pay this. If not then someone else needs to come up with $ to pay property costs on the behalf of the Trust. Could this possibly be what is happening?
In theory, the Trustee of the Trust should be very well aware of the financial situation of the Trust they are responsible for. Is there more than 1 Trustee or could things for your daughter be within the trust.... like it’s a Testamentary trust within the bigger Trust.
Trusts sound all fabulous. But there has to be $ to support it. What seems to happen is that house gets put into Trust with no real $ and the old owner has some of their retirement income (like their SS$ or pension or salary) either going into the Trust each month to cover house costs OR they continue to pay all property costs from their personal bank account. Then they die AND that $ stops cause they are dead. If trust doesn’t itself have own assets, to “feed” the trust, it will defund. Could this be what is happening or looming on the horizon? Dealing with a unplanned defunded trust is a real sticky PIA. I was coTrustee on my cousins trust and we did a planned defund and no way it was a DIY, you need an Atty to do all the filings.
probably the easiest thing to do would be for other 65% to buy out Missy 33 35% interest.
On getting paid for caregiving after the fact, I don’t see that being done. Time to get paid for doing a job is when it is being performed and being reported with taxes, FICA etc done. If the Trust has $, it should be able to pay you for management or oversight of the property in some way. Or if the Trust has your daughter as beneficiary, Trust pays you for oversight of the minor.
That said, as Trustee, I really had a hard time paying myself for doing what I felt was my duty as a daughter. It was the attorney who insisted because my dad had insisted. Had Dad not made that desire clear, there was no way I'd have paid myself.
In the first year after Dad's death, I paid myself for my work for the trust because there was a LOT of work to do, and it really did take up a lot of my time, especially with me having to drive 100 miles round trip twice a week to deal with things. However, the work load is minimal now as I oversee my mother's affairs, and I moved Mom closer to me, so I don't charge for my time. When she passes, though, I'll go back on the clock to wrap up everything. My brother is the only other beneficiary, and he's fine with that.
The short answer to your question though is no, you can't be paid if you didn't set it up in advance, but start now keeping a log of the time you spend administering your duties as Trustee so you can be paid for that work. You also should consult a trust and estate attorney and a CPA, because there are a lot of duties most Trustees don't even know about, like getting an appraisal of the property, filing an estate tax return (or postponing it, if necessary). My MIL and BIL have made an absolute train wreck of her trust by not doing the things they were supposed to in the proper time frame.