During our recent master class seminars on trusts, one specific issue that was addressed related to updating family trusts after the Bamford decision and related legislation.
The post today is the 4th and final one in this series of posts via the following video link under the heading ‘Wholesale deed updates post Bamford’. If you would like a link to the video please let me know.
As with other video posts, for those that do not have easy access to the streaming or would otherwise prefer to read the transcript, this is set out below -
The third idea is the ‘wholesale update’ approach.
The providers around are saying for $x you can go and get all of your deeds across the board 2012 compliant, really adopting the same approach that you do with an SMSF trust deed. People accept that with an SMSF, you're going to have to update it every 5 years probably. That’s just the life that you lead running an SMSF.
We would argue that people have never really had that attitude with family trusts. Whether that’s right or wrong is another question. But by and large, people have not really had that wholesale approach. We'll speak about Clark and why that may be the case from a resettlement perspective.
What we're saying with the third option is that you just go and do the update for all clients. Are you running the risk that you'll have to go and do that again in 3 or 4 years’ time? Absolutely you are. But in the meantime, are you investing in your clients by saying you will read the deed once, make sure that every deed across the entire client base has the exact same provisions, can start getting some efficiencies in terms of resolutions, in terms of the review process.
It may be a little bit of pain upfront, however hopefully, any subsequent changes won't be too prohibitive anyway and many are saying may be this is the way to go.
Until next week.
