Someone you know named you as one of the beneficiaries of their trust. When your situation meets certain criteria, you can access the assets in that trust or ask for a disbursement.
You don’t actually own or control the trust property although it benefits you. The trustee is the one who has to manage those assets and oversee the distribution of them according to the wishes of the person who created the trust.
Often, a trustee has to sell trust property to comply with the trust instructions. If there are no explicit instructions for the trustee to sell property, they may still need to in order to distribute funds to beneficiaries or cover trust administration costs. Can you stop them from selling trust assets?
Beneficiaries can challenge the trustee
If you believe that the sale of the asset will hurt the trust or its beneficiaries, you may have grounds to ask the courts to intervene. Sometimes, they will remove a trustee to preserve trust assets if that individual has a history of selling property for below the fair market value or otherwise mismanaging the assets.
In some situations, the courts may even intervene to prevent a sale before it occurs if it is a particularly large asset. For example, if you know that the trustee is in talks to sell the real estate held in the trust for half of what it would cost on the open market currently, you could use that information to ask the court to preserve those assets for the beneficiaries of the trust.
Knowing when to initiate trust litigation can help you preserve the assets intended to support you now and in the future.