Private Trust Companies

Our client families generally have several key desires regarding multi-generational planning. These desires, prioritized differently by each client, include some form of governance structure for family trusts, privacy, control and flexibility. The Rikoon Group can help arrange for trust administration and long range management of unusual assets all the while aiding the family’s promotion of social and fiscal responsibility while maximizing tax and asset protection benefits.

Our firm has worked closely with families for more than 30 years, often helping to arrange for Private Family Trust Company administration and Family Office services. We decided to deepen our services to these families and their advisors so as to apply the broad and proper knowledge we have gained over 3 decades.

Often, trust decisions are fraught with anxiety, fear, and doubt. The process of defining and protecting an inheritance does not have to be this way as it can be positive and even fun. Our goal is to draw a family closer together and create an indelible mark on your descendants’ lives, one that will continue after the present generation is gone. True inheritance is not defined solely by financial terms but is deeply entangled in one’s inner legacy by impacting what people feel, think, and say when they hear one’s name.

Most client families have one or two family members who raise concerns and have had special challenges. Rather than cutting these family members off, out of concern about what they will do with the money, keep in mind the possibility of safeguarding their money so that it is not used inappropriately. Most families want to know that every member, no matter what issues they might have, will have access to a safe place to live, quality medical care (including help with substance abuse and mental issues) and food to eat.

What opportunities do you want your children, grandchildren, and beyond to have? To travel, to pursue work as calling, to start a business, to go on extended volunteer trips, to be life-long learners, to create nonprofit organizations, to live with their families in foreign countries for a year, to run for political office, to be a stay-at-home parent…all of these goals can be structured so as to remain viable options.

We help our clients ask the question that if the world is to be a healthy place with healthy people in it, what is required?

Here are some examples from client gatherings:

Maintain the extended family as a strong unit; to inspire the entrepreneurial spark and the free-enterprise system; to promote a well-educated general population; to instill children with the spirit of giving back and impacting the world; the importance of faith and spiritual pursuits; the conservation of wild spaces and wildlife; a belief in the importance of personal ethics.