Even if you expect your children to be over age eighteen by the time you and your spouse die, you may want to consider keeping assets in a trust for your children to “protect them from themselves” until they reach a certain age when you think they will be financially and otherwise mature. This could be age 30 or 35, or older. You may even want the trust to continue for their lives to protect the assets in the trust from future claims of your child’s creditors, including in the event of your child’s divorce. (Awful and hard to think ahead like that, I know.) Assets that continue to be held in the trust are not subject to the claims of a child’s current or future creditors.
Trusts created for your children can be extremely flexible. The trustee can have the power to make liberal distributions to the child for any reason you would like, or for no reason (complete discretion). At a certain specific age, the child can become a co-trustee of his or her own trust, and can have the power to remove and replace the co-trustee making the distribution decisions, thus giving the child enormous control over his or her own trust.
Source: Should You Create Trusts for Your Kids? | Farrell Fritz, P.C. – JDSupra
