The Family Bank: Trusts, Trust Companies, and Private Wealth Under American Law

This is a study of American trust law written from inside the fiduciary office, for the practitioner who administers trusts and for the trustee who has just been appointed and now holds title to property that belongs, in equity, to someone else. It's meant to be worked through in order, and it rewards the reader who does.

The book opens with what a trust is under American law and builds from there through the office of the executive fiduciary, the three offices of every trust, the duties, the taxation, and the accounting, so that the reader carries the working machinery before anything is sold to him. It then takes apart, claim by claim, the trust structures marketed to American families, with the statute, the regulation, or the case that decides each one, and shows what those same structures do when they're built lawfully. The second half is the architecture the largest families actually run: the Family Trust Company, chartered and unchartered, what it can do, how it earns, what being defined as a bank under federal and state law buys it, the situs the trustee picks and can move, the insurance it holds, the loans it makes, the committees that decide, and the trusts it administers across generations, with the regulated and unregulated tiers compared state by state.

The chapters are built around composite matters handled on behalf of wealthy families, each one carried through the clause relied on, the facts known at the time, the determination memorandum, the notice, the payments, and the accounting entries that make the fiduciary's act lawful within the instrument and defensible in court. Every position rests on the enacted statutes, the Internal Revenue Code and its regulations, the reported cases, and the Restatement (Third) of Trusts, with the authority named where the reader needs it and more than 1,700 endnotes carrying the citations. Where the states divide, the text says which states and which way.

What you receive: the complete book as a single PDF, 673 pages in a two-column typeset layout, forty-one chapters across six parts, five appendices including the state-by-state matrix of trust jurisdictions and the full authority crosswalk, a glossary, and an index of terms and authorities. The file downloads immediately after purchase and is stamped with the purchaser's email.

The book provides general legal information for study and professional reference. The matters described are composites, assembled so that no family, trust, or person can be identified. It isn't advice on any particular situation, and no client or fiduciary relationship arises from reading it; engage qualified counsel, licensed where you live, for your own facts.