The Professional Fiduciary Association of California (PFAC) is a statewide organization with over 500 members dedicated to serving and protecting the best interests of those who have placed their trust in them by ensuring the highest standards of ethics and practice, requiring licensure, maintaining high qualifications for membership, requiring the continuing education of members, and the mentoring of new members.
Fiduciaries pay the bills and handle the investments of trusts, decedents’ estates and conservatorships. Trustees manage money, and oftentimes, difficult people and situations. When money is involved, beneficiaries and trustees sometimes have disagreements, and family arguments can be among the most rancorous. There are plenty of traditional families, blended families, dysfunctional families that are faced with an abundance of problems and issues when a parent dies or becomes incapacitated and there is money in an estate to be protected and invested. That resolution often names a private professional fiduciary as the new trustee. Many attorneys, accountants and estate planners, who know good private professional fiduciaries, sometimes suggest a professional be named as trustee when a new trust is written.