Why Normal People Are Setting Up Trust Funds for Their Kids

Dear Jess from six months ago,

You're currently sitting at the kitchen table at 11:47 PM. You have stale Goldfish crumbs stuck to your sweatpants, you're surrounded by fifty half-packed Etsy resin orders, and you're hyperventilating while staring at a scary legal website. Your oldest child—the four-year-old who currently thinks he's a ninja turtle—just tried to ride the family dog down the wooden staircase this afternoon. The baby is finally asleep after three false starts, and your toddler is currently trying to kick a hole in the drywall from her crib.

I know exactly what you're thinking right now because I'm you. You just realized that if you and your husband happen to meet an untimely end on a slippery stretch of I-35, your three chaotic children are going to be legally handed over to your sister, a woman who considers strawberry Pop-Tarts a balanced breakfast and once let her own car insurance lapse because she 'forgot the password to the app.'

You're panicking about what would happen to the life insurance money, the house, and the measly savings you’ve managed to scrape together. Take a breath, pour yourself some cold coffee, and listen to me. We're going to set up a trust, and no, we're not suddenly fancy.

The midnight panic over legal paperwork

Look, when somebody drops the phrase trust fund baby meaning into a conversation, our brains immediately go to some obnoxious guy named Chad wearing loafers without socks, demanding to speak to the manager at a country club. We think of ultra-rich kids from New York who never have to work a day in their lives and complain about their yacht maintenance fees. We live in rural Texas, y'all. Our idea of a luxury vehicle is a minivan where the sliding doors actually work on the first try. So the idea of putting our kids into that category feels ridiculous and, honestly, a little embarrassing.

But the truth is, I was letting pop culture dictate my financial anxiety. According to some article I skimmed while nursing the baby at 3 AM, only something like one percent of people actually get this kind of inheritance, and most of them just get it directly from their regular, middle-class parents who managed to pay off a house. It’s not about having millions of dollars. It’s about having a legal bucket to put your assets in so the court system doesn't chew up your life insurance money before your kids ever see a dime of it.

My grandma used to say, "Don't count your chickens before they hatch, but for heaven's sake, build a sturdy coop." Bless her heart, she lived on a tiny public school teacher's pension just like my mom did, but she understood the assignment. You don't need a golden egg; you just need to protect the regular eggs from the coyotes.

So, what's a trust fund baby in the real world? It's just a kid whose parents loved them enough to pay a lawyer to fill out some incredibly boring paperwork so they wouldn't be left destitute or hit with massive probate taxes if the worst happened. That's it. It’s the ultimate, morbid act of maternal nesting.

My paralyzing fear that my children will become useless adults

Now, I need to vent about the thing that almost stopped me from doing this altogether. I've this deep, dark fear that if my kids know there's a safety net waiting for them, they'll completely fail to launch. They will just live in my basement until they're forty, playing video games and asking me to cut the crusts off their sandwiches.

My oldest is a walking cautionary tale of entitlement already. The other day, I told him we couldn't buy a plastic dinosaur at Target, and he looked me dead in the eye and said, "Just tell the machine to give you more money." He meant the ATM. He thinks I've a magic wall that dispenses twenty-dollar bills on command. If I hand that kid fifty thousand dollars of life insurance money the minute he turns eighteen, he's going to buy a monster truck, a lifetime supply of Skittles, and probably a real, live monkey.

Which is why you don't just leave your money to an eighteen-year-old in a regular will. The lawyer I eventually hired—a very patient man who looked at my sleep-deprived face with deep pity—explained that we could put rules on the money. My imperfect understanding of the financial mumbo-jumbo is that you can basically act like a ghost parent from beyond the grave. You can tell the trustee (the person managing the money, which we designated as my hyper-responsible accountant cousin instead of the Pop-Tart sister) to only release funds if the kids hit certain milestones.

You can say they only get a chunk of money if they graduate college, or if they start a business, or you can stagger it so they get a little at twenty-five, a little at thirty, and the rest at thirty-five when their prefrontal cortex is hopefully fully formed. You can literally create an incentive structure from the afterlife so your kids still have to get a job. Irrevocable versus revocable trusts are a whole other beast, but just pick the revocable one so you can change it when they inevitably make you mad during their teenage years, moving on.

Choices that actually last through the chaos

Look, I'm just gonna be real with you, setting this up cost us about a thousand bucks. That's a massive hit to our budget. I had to sell a lot of custom Etsy mugs to cover that lawyer fee. But the way I forced my husband to look at it was through the lens of long-term investments, which is exactly how we've to look at everything with three kids under five.

You know how we justify spending thirty bucks on that Kianao Long Sleeve Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit? We do it because we know it’s honestly going to survive all three kids. I used to buy those cheap multipacks from the big box stores, and my oldest blew out the back of three of them in a single week. They stretched out, pilled up, and looked like dirty dish rags after two washes. But that Kianao organic bodysuit somehow survived the Great Stomach Bug Incident of 2023, went through the hot wash cycle a dozen times, and I'm literally putting it on our third baby right now and it still looks brand new. Quality over fast-fashion garbage always pays off in the end. Setting up this trust is the exact same math, just with legal documents instead of baby clothes.

And while we're talking about surviving the baby trenches, let me just level with you about managing expectations. I'm trying to teach my kids delayed gratification so they don't grow up spoiled, and that means not fixing every single minor inconvenience instantly. Although, full disclosure, I totally bought that Panda Teether Silicone from Kianao thinking the cute shape and food-grade silicone would magically fix the baby's 3 AM teething wakeups. It’s fine. It’s cute, and he chews on it, but it’s just a teether, y'all—it didn't save my life or suddenly make him sleep through the night. Honestly, it mostly gets lost under the couch alongside the stale Goldfish. It does the job, but it's not a miracle worker.

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The financial comfort blanket

honestly, going to the lawyer and signing those terrifying papers is about building a safety net. You want your kids covered if the worst happens.

It’s exactly like swaddling them up in that ridiculously soft Colored Universe Bamboo Baby Blanket. I bought the giant 120x120cm one for the baby, but I'm not gonna lie, I steal it constantly. I use it as a lap blanket while I'm sitting in the cold living room at midnight packing boxes for the shop. It's stupidly soft, it washes beautifully, and it just feels like a giant, protective hug. That's exactly what a trust fund is. It's a legal, financial hug that you're leaving folded up in a drawer for your kids, just in case they ever need it to keep warm.

You don't need a yacht. You don't need to be pulling in seven figures. You just need to scrape together the lawyer fee, find an attorney who speaks plain English instead of legal jargon, and sign the dang papers before you lose your nerve and go back to worrying about the dog getting ridden down the stairs.

It's going to be okay. Get some sleep.

Love,
Jess

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The messy questions I asked my lawyer

Do I seriously need to be rich to set this up?
Nope. My lawyer literally laughed when I asked this. If you've a house, a life insurance policy, or even just a decent savings account, you've enough to protect. The goal is to keep your assets out of probate court, which is a slow, expensive nightmare that will drain whatever small amount of money you really managed to leave behind.

How much did the lawyer honestly cost you?
I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, it was about $1,200 total for my husband and me to get a joint revocable trust, our wills, and our medical directives done. I know you can use those online legal websites for cheaper, but with three kids and a small business, I needed an actual human being to explain to me how to prevent my sister from buying a jet ski with my life insurance money.

Should I tell my kids they've money waiting for them?
My pediatrician and my lawyer oddly gave me the exact same advice on this: absolutely not. At least not until they're old enough to understand the value of a dollar. We aren't breathing a word about the trust until they're in their twenties and trying to buy a house or pay off student loans. Until then, they can keep doing their chores for a five-dollar allowance.

What if my kid turns out to be a total mess?
This was my biggest panic. The beauty of the trust is that you can put a "spendthrift" clause in it. From my messy understanding, it basically means if your kid grows up, gets in massive credit card debt, and gets sued by a credit card company, the creditors can't bust into the trust fund to take the money. It protects your kid from their own dumb decisions.

Can I just put my house in the trust?
Yes, and you absolutely should. We had to do a "quitclaim deed" to transfer our house from our personal names into the name of the trust. It sounds terrifying, but it doesn't change our mortgage or our property taxes. It just means if we die, the house automatically passes to the kids without a judge having to get involved. Less government involvement is always a win in my book.