TrustWorthy: New Angles on Trusts from Beneficiaries and Trustees: A Positive Story Project showcasing beneficiaries and trustees

They helped keep my learning engaged and in forward motion. Thank you for your work. As an author I know the effort.

Trustworthy is an excellent resource for anyone involved in a beneficiary/trustee relationship. So many books are written about the technical nature of trusts (much like a travel agent tells you about exciting places to visit), while Trustworthy takes on the role of a tour guide and leads the reader on a journey to experience excellence in the trust world. Trustworthy will open your mind to what a trust can be.

Trusts are a feature of many families, not just the super-wealthy. A trust is a vehicle that allows the transfer of assets across generations. Most trusts are made for tax purposes, or to provide for a young family member. But the creation of a trust also creates a strange relationship between the wealth creator, the people who receive the benefits of the money int he trust, and the special person who is named the beneficiary, who is charged with keeping the rules of the trust. Goldstone and Wiseman focus on the relationships that grow up in this triangle, and their effects on each of the people involved. The book is short, and has 25 stories by people in these relationships who have had positive experiences. The negative experiences we can read in news accounts of family feuds and lawsuits, but we often don't learn much about what it is like when they work. This book should be given to anyone who creates, benefits or is trustee for a trust. The legal requirements are often less important than the personal relationships that are created, and to my knowledge, this is the only book that takes on this topic. It is well written, vivid, clear and useful.

Anyone in Asia who is a trust creator, a beneficiary, or involved in any way with the Asian trust industry should take Hartley Goldstone and Kathy Wiseman's collection of positive stories as compulsory reading material.In Asia, for the vast majority of family trusts, the trust creator is still alive. Read these stories to learn about the issues that beneficiaries in the third generation and beyond will have to deal with.Second, wealthy Asian families are always looking for role models and example of what other families have done well and this book is filled from cover to cover with positive success stories.Third, this offers a very important reminder that a trust is a relationship, not a product. It will change the way in which you think about selecting trustees and deciding on trust protectors and advisors.Finally, the focus of this book is squarely on the well-being & success of the family system and its stories model the way to use a trust relationship to nurture mature responsible beneficiaries.

TrustWorthy: New Angles on Trusts from Beneficiaries and Trustees: A Positive Story Project showcasing beneficiaries and trustees (Volume 1) Hartley and Kathy offer terrific insights on how to help families flourish in the trustscape. They wonderfully mix both didactic text with short, moving stories they they've carefully edited and arranged.Full disclosure: one of the success stories is out of my files. And the book stands just fine, thank you, even without my single contribution.Their wisdom is not only critically important, but unfortunately unique in trustee trainings: it's currently NOT taught in any of the trustee trainings I know of.This book is now required reading at my trustee best practices study group, the Chicago Trustee Collaboratory. At the Collaboratory we take our mission of articulating best practices very seriously. So, it shouldn't be a surprise that this book is central to our work.

TrustWorthy is a must-read for anyone having a role in a trust. The array of positive stories defies the lore that trusts are necessarily bad and burdensome. The reader will come away from these stories with hope and confidence in the power to shift to a better outcome, along with specific ideas to act upon to build strength in their families. It is easy for both trustees and beneficiaries to become mired in small ranges of behaviors, each for their own reasons. TrustWorthy gives us examples of attitudes and behaviors that are sure to expand the thinking on both sides of the equation, and will lead to more constructive uses of trusts. It is the perfect book to turn a heretofore negative reality into a positive one.Thayer Cheatham Willis, LCSW, Principal, Thayer Willis LLC andauthor of Navigating The Dark Side of Wealth and Beyond Gold

If you're thinking about how to maximize your gift exemption or make an annual gift in a trust, this book is for you. Hartley and Kathy make the often-arcane world of trust terminology transparent to regular readers. They also offer specific strategies for using trusts to grow beneficiaries and help them become independent adults rather than dependent "trustafarians." The stories are the core. They truly illustrate what others have done; what's worked, what hasn't. And if you feel like your trusts have already started to go sour, it's not too late: there are stories here about how things can be made better. This is a great resource for givers, beneficiaries, and advisers. You can also read more and share your stories at Hartley and Kathy's website--navigatingthetrustscape.com. Take a look!