Discretionary Trusts
Discretionary trusts provide trustees with the novel ability to retain discretion on how the property and income of a trust is dispersed to the beneficiaries. In the case of a discretionary trust, the trust deed will still prove essential to regulating how a trustee will behave and our lawyers can effectively draft the trust deed to ensure that a trustee behaves as intended by the settlor and beneficiaries.
Discretionary trusts become valuable in the context of flexible distributions to ensure income stays below a particular tax threshold, to protect excluded assets from shareholders, to control assets on an inter-generational basis and promote large-scale investment opportunities that would otherwise not be possible.
At the same time, our Gold Coast lawyers also offer our business clients the option to establish unit trusts. Unit trusts operate much like companies – units of the trust are dispersed to beneficiaries the same way shareholders receive shares in a company. Unit trusts are often useful for the co-ownership of assets, particularly if it is the case that the parties to a trust deed have different degrees of involvement or ownership over an asset.