The Trust: Short Story Series, #1

By Joyce Zborower, M.A.

Do you trust the person you’ve chosen to write the legal documents governing your estate?

THE TRUST is a fictional slice of life centered around a traumatic series of events related to securing a family's wealth and property for the benefit of their children after their deaths.

Everyone wants to make sure their children are the recipients of the parents’ estate. It's important to be careful who you choose to make that happen for you while you're alive because whatever legal papers you sign will become the governing body of directives.

THE TRUST is a cautionary tale. . . Take heed!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joyce Zborower, M.A.
• Release date: Dec 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781519975966

Book preview

November 12

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I need to write this down because I’m afraid we did something last night that might result in losing the house.  ... or worse.

I will start from the beginning. Suzy Orman on Oprah. Yes, that’s where I first got the idea that we need to set up a Trust. You know, so that when we died the children wouldn’t have to go through probate. "Everybody needs a Trust!" That’s what she said, didn’t she? Well, I thought that meant us as well.

Anyway, I began reading books on what we should do with our money. Most of our assets were cash, besides the house and cars of course. There were the IRAs, cash. There were the Retirement Account and Deferred Compensation; we had also elected for cash accounts in these investments. We had tried stocks at one point but we didn’t know what we were doing, becoming very anxious on a daily basis watching the numbers in the paper fluctuate rapidly, first one way and then the other.

Compounding the daily anxiety was the knowledge that we didn’t know when to sell, or buy for that matter, and we lost everything we had invested. In dollar amounts, for someone else, this probably wouldn’t have amounted to anything more than a very nice vacation, but we don’t take vacations and Steve works very hard for the money he brings home. Losing it like that was akin to flushing it down the toilet. We didn’t want any more stocks.

So I read books. There were Suzy’s books, of course, the one she had been peddling on TV that day as well as her earlier book; You earned It, Don’t Lose It, and Pollan & Levine’s Die Broke, among others. And I rather insisted that Steve read these also.

He is a very avid reader, finishing book after book after book. But his taste doesn’t run to anything useful. He reads adventure novels and spy stories and detective crap. With the amount of reading he does, if he ever decided to read informative non-fiction, he maybe could learn something. But trying to get him to read these dry, informative, useful works was worse than the proverbial pulling of the teeth. But he did it, albeit grudgingly, and it took him literally months to finish one book.

While I was waiting for him to finish his second book so that we could discuss our financial situation again, Steve was involved in a car accident. It was a very bad accident and could have been fatal . . . or worse!

He was on his way to work one morning, stopped at a stop light just down the block from our house. The light turned green. He pulled into the intersection and looked to his left just in time to see a big red Dodge truck barreling through the red light.   Oh. Shit! was what he told me he had said just before that truck smashed into the driver’s side door of his beautiful silver "95 T-bird.

What a great car! I saw it after it had been towed to the impound yard. We went there later that week to get the rest of his belongings before it was taken away.

Tears were welling up in my eyes as I kissed my fingers and touched them to the car and said, Thank you, car. Somebody bought it, apparently with the intention of repairing it, even though our insurance company said the frame was bent and trying to fix it was something they considered undoable. As far as they were concerned, it was totaled.

I did say ‘fatal . . . or worse’, didn’t I. The ‘or worse’ part was what could have happened to me if he didn’t die but ended up in an extended coma. Everything was in both our names; I had no Power of Attorney, financial or medical. If, for some reason, I had to sell the house, I would have had to go to court to get permission. This costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. This event only served to reinforce my resolve that we needed the Trust package, and we needed it as soon as was practicable.

——————-

Steve and I decided to get some financial advice.

I found James T. Rivers, Financial Advisor, in the yellow pages and called The Better Business Bureau as well as his licensing agency. He had been in business