#1 Extending perpetuity laws

At the moment, when you set up a family trust, it has a time limit of 80 years.  Then you have to wrap it up and distribute the assets.  The new legislation suggests extending it to 125 years, which may involve significant succession planning adjustments.

#2 More information access for beneficiaries

In its draft form, the Trusts Bill proposes to give most trust beneficiaries the legal right to financial reports on the state of the family trust – meaning they’ll be able to request more information including ‘who’s getting what’.  Whether beneficiaries have the right to request this information under our current law is a bit of a grey area.

Because this potentially opens a can of worms for trustees, this proposal has been controversial and has attracted a lot of feedback from trust advisers.  We will have to wait until later in the year to see what changes (if any) are made to this proposal.