Estate Planning for Blended Families
Balancing Love, Fairness, and Legacy
Blended families are beautiful and more common, but they bring unique challenges when it comes to estate planning. When spouses bring separate assets, children from prior marriages, and shared new wealth into one household, “what’s fair” becomes deeply personal.
Here are three key areas to consider when designing an estate plan that protects everyone involved.
1. Joint Trust or Individual Trusts?
For first marriages, a joint revocable trust often makes sense. But for blended families, it’s not always that simple.
Joint Trusts can streamline management during life, but they can also complicate what happens after the first spouse passes away. The surviving spouse might have full control over assets intended for the other spouse’s children.
Individual Trusts give each spouse more control and flexibility. Each can decide how their separate assets are handled after death, which is especially important when there are children from previous relationships.
Hybrid Approach when it makes sense, one joint trust for shared property and individual trusts for separate assets is also an option to consider.
2. Protecting Children from Prior Marriages
Without careful planning, children from a first marriage can unintentionally be disinherited. Consider these safeguards:
Use separate trusts to ensure assets meant for your children stay protected.
Name your own trustee for your individual trust.
Clearly define which assets are joint versus separate and how each should be distributed.
For example, a family home might pass to the surviving spouse for life, while investment accounts go directly into a trust for the children.
3. Choosing the Right Trustee (and Maybe a Trust Protector)
The successor trustee’s role becomes even more important in blended family situations. You want someone who can remain neutral balancing loyalty, fairness, and good judgment.
If neither a spouse nor a child feels like the right fit, a corporate trustee or professional fiduciary can step in.
Additionally, consider naming a Trust Protector: a person or firm with limited powers to modify or oversee the trust if circumstances change. This safeguard ensures your plan stays aligned with your intentions, even years later.
Blended families deserve estate plans that honor every relationship and protect every legacy.
If you and your spouse are navigating these questions, whether to combine or separate your trusts, how to protect children, or who should serve as trustee, we can help you design a plan built on clarity and peace of mind.