Legal Question in Wills and Trusts in Virginia

Re: dissolving a trust

If your only justification for "breaking" the trust is that you and your sister as trust beneficiaries have not yet attained the age which by its terms the trust is to dissolve and final distributions made, you can forget about it. It's simply not going to happen.

The settlor(the maker)of this trust undoubtedly had very specific reasons in mind when he wrote

the age limitation terms into the trust which you would now like to do away with. To allow you to now vary those terms and terminate the trust would defeat the whole purpose of what the trust was designed to accomplish---at least from the settlor's point of view.

Re: dissolving a trust

I am a little confused because it is extraordinarly rare to have age limitations older than 35, and you say you are in your 40's.

However, the creator of the trust might have thought of it as a retirement fund for you.

So I assume that the age is older than the 40's.

If there are grounds to change the trust, they would have to lie elsewhere, such as how the trust was created, what the real intent was, whether circumstances have changed so dramatically as to defeat the creator's intent (unlikely to work in most situations), whether it was validly created, whether it has very exotic problems such as the "rule against perpetuities" (which all lawyers know about, but nobody really understands, it is such an unwieldy beast).

Also, it would be helpful to look carefully at the language creating the age limitation to make sure it was intended to be a BINDING requirement, rather than just a suggestion for the trustee to follow.

I would also find it rather unusual if you are not receiving INCOME from investments even now. While it is possible to write a trust so that you get nothing at all until the age named is reached, this is not the usual trust, and so you would want to read the trust carefully. Normally, someone gets INCOME all along, but then the principal ("corpus") of the trust is handed over completely when the age is reached.

But you would have to find some other problem with the trust, not the age issue alone.

While I share my colleague's pessimism about your chances of success, if you want me to take a look at the trust and surrounding circumstances, I do have some good experience in these issues after some major litigation on trusts I was heavily involved in. My fees are only $120 per hour, because I am out on my own and do not maintain an expensive office.