Education is powerful and can help someone change their circumstances. Perhaps you built a successful business or professional practice because of your dedication to academic pursuits. Maybe you’ve just seen firsthand how education can empower those seeking to change their lives.
Choosing to create a scholarship fund as part of your legacy can be profound. It can have a lasting impact on people that you and even your children may never meet. Especially if you want to create a long-term scholarship fund, working with a professional fiduciary could be a smart move.
A scholarship fund could persist for generations
Unless you only have the resources to offer a single award, a scholarship fund will typically earmark a specific amount of money per year to grant, possibly the gains secured by investing capital. Proper management of the resources intended for a scholarship fund can mean that it helps people for decades after its initial creation.
If that is the goal for your scholarship fund, then naming a friend or family member to serve as the trustee for the fund could be a mistake. Ultimately, control of the fund will pass to someone else, and you may not have any influence over who that next trustee or fiduciary is. There’s also the risk of poor asset management. Nepotism and corruption could lead to embezzlement from the fund or the loss of the assets necessary to keep offering the scholarship.
Hiring a professional fiduciary to manage the scholarship helps ensure competent management of the assets and seamless transfer of control from one party to the next over the generations. Working with a professional fiduciary can be a way for someone with an estate plan to make those plans a reality.