You Can Put Gold & Silver Into a Trust. I Have a Follow Up Question: Why Would You Want To?

You Can Put Gold in a Trust. So Naturally, I Had Questions.

Someone asked me today whether gold and silver could be put into a trust.

And for once, I did not have an immediate answer.

I have been asked about houses, land, bank accounts, businesses, mineral interests, family heirlooms, guns, cows, collections and all manner of property people have accumulated over a lifetime.

Gold bars had somehow escaped me.

So I looked.

And yes. Apparently, we can put the gold in the trust.

Louisiana law allows property capable of private ownership to be transferred into trust, which means physical gold, silver, bullion and coins can potentially be trust property.

That answered the legal question.

It did absolutely nothing to answer the question now bothering me:

Why would you want to put your gold in a trust?

Turns out, that question is considerably more interesting.

Imagine somebody has spent thirty years buying silver coins. Or inherited a collection from a parent. Or owns bullion as part of an investment strategy. Maybe it is worth $10,000. Maybe it is worth $200,000.

Maybe nobody in the family has the slightest idea what is in the safe because Dad’s estate-planning strategy consisted primarily of saying, “Don’t worry about it.”

Now Dad dies.

Three children know there is “some gold somewhere.”

One thinks it belongs to him because Dad once said he could have it. One wants to sell it immediately. One insists certain coins came from Grandpa and should never leave the family.

Nobody knows exactly what exists.

Nobody knows what it is worth.

And congratulations, we have turned estate administration into a treasure hunt with attorneys.

That is where the trust starts making considerably more sense.

A properly planned trust can say exactly what happens to that property.

Keep the collection together.

Sell it and divide the proceeds.

Give particular pieces to particular people.

Hold it for children or grandchildren until a certain age.

Allow a trustee to manage it if the owner becomes incapacitated.

Give someone actual authority to insure it, store it, value it and deal with it instead of leaving the family staring at a locked safe and arguing over who knows the combination.

And this is really the part of estate planning that gets overlooked.

People tend to think estate planning is about having a will.

It is not.

It is about answering questions before the people you love are forced to answer them while grieving, guessing and occasionally fighting with one another.

Who owns this?

Where is it?

Who controls it?

Who gets it?

Can it be sold?

Should it be sold?

What happens if I am alive but cannot manage it myself?

Those questions matter whether the asset is a checking account, 200 acres of family land or twelve gold bars sitting in a safe.

Of course, putting gold or silver into a trust does not sprinkle legal fairy dust over it.

A trust does not automatically eliminate taxes. It does not automatically protect assets from creditors or Medicaid. It does not cure bad planning. And merely typing “all my gold” onto a piece of paper is not much of an inventory system.

If physical precious metals are going into a trust, somebody needs to know what exists, where it is, how it is titled or documented, how it is stored and how the trustee is supposed to get to it.

Otherwise we are right back to the treasure hunt.

But I loved this question because it is a good reminder that estate planning is not supposed to be one-size-fits-all.

Real people do not all own a house, two bank accounts and a sensible little retirement fund.

They own family land.

Coin collections.

Businesses.

Mineral rights.

Old cars.

Guns.

Jewelry.

Livestock.

Things hidden in safes that their children have been explicitly instructed not to ask about.

And, apparently, gold.

So yes.

You can put gold and silver into a trust.

But the better estate-planning question will almost always be:

What do you want to happen to it when you are no longer the person standing there making the decisions?

That is where the actual planning begins.

Judith L. Hampton

Attorney-at-Law

Hampton Law Firm

For more plain-English information about wills, trusts, powers of attorney and Louisiana estate planning, visit HamptonLawLA.com.

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General educational information only. Estate planning, tax and asset-protection consequences depend on the particular property, trust and circumstances involved.