Bea Anderson and her siblings have always made decisions about their shared cabin with a handshake. With just a brother and a sister and their spouses to consult, that hasn’t so hard. But the cabin on Lake Vermillion, which has been in the family for more than 50 years, will pass to seven families in the next generation. “When there’s more people involved, then you get more opinions. We wanted to set up guidelines about how we feel the cabin can be run successfully,” Bea’s husband, Jerry Anderson, said. They needed a plan and turned to a cabin trust. Without a trust, cabins are often passed to the next generation in equal shares, with equal responsibility for the expenses and upkeep. That arrangement is known as tenants-in-common. No problem, right?

I shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that I get a number of requests to create a Cabin Trust for a family after the cabin has passed to the next generation. Only then do the children realize that this asset of their inheritance was more of a problem than a gift.

I believe the estate planning community, me included, owes family cabin owners an apology. For years, too few of us have taken seriously our role as counselors as well as attorneys. There are certain family assets, a cabin among them, in which we should have recognized the potential for family conflict but did nothing to prevent it.

First of all, when considering whether a Cabin Trust is right for any family, I always encourage my clients to simply ask the kids whether they would want to keep the cabin when the parents pass away.

Parents must be parents one more time when crafting a cabin trust for their estate plan to prevent the kids from fighting over the family cabin or vacation home when the parents are gone.

Choosing the right cabin trust attorney to draft and execute a cabin trust for your family’s cabin can have repercussions in your family for decades to come…

The children now own a valuable piece of property together and this multiple ownership situation is destined to be a disaster for the kids without a framework to address those problems. The problems with multiple ownership of the cabin are many…

A cabin trust for Minnesota cabin owners is a new approach to a very old question. How do we keep the family cabin in the family?

While the idea of using a trust as a common estate planning tool is not new, the “bells and whistles” of the Minnesota Cabin Trust make it a new approach.

New Cabin Trust keeps kids from fighting over the family cabin when parents are gone…

MINNEAPOLIS, MN, Oct. 2 – Fighting over the family cabin after the parents are gone can devastate relationships between siblings. The Cabin Trust