What Can We Learn From the Beckham’s Family Drama?

If you haven’t heard, I’ll fill you in. Almost 4 years after their wedding, Nicola Petz (daughter of billionaire Nelson Petz and model Claudia Heffner Petz) and Brooklyn Beckham (son of superstars David and Victoria Beckham) are still allegedly upset about their wedding drama. The newlyweds DID NOT enjoy Posh Spice’s behavior at their wedding (rumors of inappropriate dancing and an alleged hijacked first couple dance) and took it to streets (and by the streets, I mean social media). 

So, what can we learn from these nepo babies’ in-law drama?

We can discuss the best ways to cut your children’s spouses (and future former spouses) out of your estate plan LOL

Sure, we can include the statement, “it’s the grantor’s intentions that a spouse or former spouse of a beneficiary not stand to inherit from this trust or any trust hereunder.” And that’s good. We can also ensure that the spendthrift provision is included in the body of the trust as a way to mitigate the chances of our children’s spouses claiming our trust assets as marital property. 

But, if we really want to tighten it up, we would make the successor trustee of our trust have more power to disburse. Ensuring that the trustee has what we call “discretionary power” which is really power, at their discretion, so the trustee controls the distributions versus the children themselves deciding when they get the trust funds or the Grantor (you) deciding in advance how much the kids get. 

We can have limited discretion where the trustee provides for the children’s health, education, maintenance and control (this is most common and called HEMS), or we can have pure discretion where the trustee can disburse funds at his or her discretion to the beneficiaries. The more power the trustee has over the distributions, the more difficult it will be for the children’s grubby little spouses to claim that the trust is marital property.

Of course, we would want to consider WHO the successor trustee will be. If you make your child the trustee of their trust (and give them discretionary power), you may want to add a co-trustee or add a trust protector to protect the assets from your child’s divorce drama.

So, there you have it. We learn that there are a few tricks that we can use in the trust to protect our children from their bad decisions and that I am very likely to ruin my children’s weddings with my inappropriate dancing, stand by for the pictures LOL.