Emily Sippola

Review of Greenleaf trust

Mostly pleasant but insufficiently competent

Mostly pleasant but insufficiently competent

My parents had set up a trust through Greenleaf for three main reasons: 1) my mother owned a large business, and selling or dissolving it would be a lot of work 2) my parents wanted to spare us the hassle of dealing with every moving part of their financial and property matters while we were grieving and 3) to prevent our sibling relationship from being tarnished by fighting over money and stuff. By the time I was orphaned, #1 was irrelevant. Working with Greenleaf accomplished #3 only.

Throughout the process, Greenleaf asked my co-beneficiary and me to make a lot of decisions, which was fine. However, there were significant errors along the way, most notably:
- We had to pay an additional $3,600 in moving costs because they failed to move property as we indicated
- One child's savings account was improperly assigned to an unknown owner, requiring more than 20 hours of work on my part over eight months
- Today, I learned that Greenleaf failed to claim hundreds of dollars in credits owed to the trust by a cooperative, and I have to spend time completing forms and getting documents notarized