News & Alerts

By: Jeremy Skoglund, VP Trust Officer

What does a Trust Department do?

Almost everyone knows the services that a Bank offers: checking accounts, savings accounts, IRAs, wire transfers, loans, and so on. Some banks have an insurance department. Some have investment advisors. Some banks also have a Trust Department, but what exactly does a Trust Department do? If you’ve been following our Trust Tuesday blog, you’ve probably gathered that the Trust Department can help with:

·        Retirement Plans

·        Investments

·        Trustee of a Trust

Those are the primary areas a Trust Department works with, but those are very broad areas. Retirement Plans can include 401(k)s and IRAs. Investments can include stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. If that’s not confusing enough for you, did you know that there are many different kinds of Trusts? There are Revocable and Irrevocable Trusts, Life Insurance Trusts, Charitable Remainder Trusts, Split Interest Trusts, Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts, Grantor Retained Income Trusts. I’m not making these names up. Trusts can have so many different names because you can do so many different things with a Trust. If I want to make sure my wife is taken care of, but leave the rest of my estate to a charity when she is gone, I can use a Charitable Remainder Trust.

The one thing each Trust has to have is property. The biggest thing a Trust Department does is it helps you manage that property. If you want to know if the various Trusts I named are actually types of Trusts, give us a call. We will even help explain why you would want each one.