Reclaim Losses

dunstonh

Spoke to my parents earlier and the money was put into Trust with my Cousin and my Parents as Trustees.

That may explain why the Cousin is the only one getting paperwork if he is down as the registered address.

They now want to get out of it but I can't find out much about the process involved.

As Aegis says, it will depend on the trust but also the investments used. If an offshore bond or onshore bond was used then there may well be charges.

If their reason is more a case of being concerned about lack of information or uncertainty of what is going on then they should seek advice to get clarification of their options first. The trust may be the right thing and its just the lack of documentation that concerns them. That can be easily resolved.

jamesd

Is money being paid out by the trust? That could explain a decrease in value even though investments have generally increased over the last year.

For now your parents just need to try to get the documentation. Since they are trustees they have a legal obligation to do that anyway and most certainly shouldn't be signing blank pieces of paper. If there are other beneficiaries and there has been any actual misconduct their clear neglect to do their trustee job could produce liability for them. Fortunately this is unlikely, but they need to be aware of it.

They need to get a copy of whatever document was written around their signature if it was truly a blank piece of paper.

If you can find out the full names of the investments then we can probably easily point you to an independent source of performance figures for them. Trustnet is one of many sources and that link goes to the list of funds in the generally medium risk balanced managed sector.

Deciding to try to get out of it is premature at the moment, since what happened isn't known and the actual values aren't known. If the investments turn out to not match their risk desires, they can be changed without the need to get rid of the underlying structure and perhaps face significant charges for doing that.

First get the investment details and documentation. Then you can ask about the decisions made here and we'll be able to say whether what happened looks reasonable in the circumstances.