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Until recently, many families filled key governance roles associated with their trust and estate planning with trusted friends, colleagues, or advisors who were flattered to be asked and honored to serve.

You’ve built a valuable and successful business through hard work, long hours and countless decisions. You want to plan for transitioning the company, and the wealth you’ve created to future generations, but you aren’t ready to cede control. As the company grows in value, the issue becomes acute. What do you do? You’re not alone.

Trusts have grown enormously in popularity since the mid-1990s as a result of the development of modern trust laws, the dramatic increase in wealth and evolving family needs and goals.

The raison d’être for families to form a Private Family Trust Company (PFTC) is to maximize their lawful control over their wealth held in trust. A cynic might suggest families want that control just to inflate current distributions to family members, but in practice that isn’t what motivates families. What motivates them is that control gives them the capability to devise and implement a strategic plan for managing and deploying their wealth in the ways they believe give them the best opportunity to realize multigenerational hopes and aspiration.

Estate planning is often part of a divorce settlement, and negotiation of these terms can be as integral to the divorce settlement as allocation of parental responsibilities, support issues, or division of marital estate. For example, even a relatively simple Marital Settlement Agreement may generally contain waivers of an ex-spouse’s right to make claims to the other party’s estate upon death, including rights to property and to act as a trustee or executor of the estate.

We often think of Thanksgiving and Giving Tuesday as ushering in the year-end charitable giving season. Year end is not only a time for gratitude, as families gather for the holidays, but also a time to start organizing financially for the close of the calendar year. But year-end giving does not need to be short-term giving. So even as you strive to be tax-efficient and timely in your year-end giving, those gifts can be part of a longer-term charitable giving strategy.

There has been so much attention this fall on the presidential election that the end of the year has rapidly come upon us. Regardless of the outcome of the election, neither candidate will be able to change the current tax law this year, so most of the usual year-end tax planning strategies remain the same. However, one recent development has caused us to move the always-important “Review your estate plan” to the top of the list.