Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Marital Trusts

Dear Doddoy,\n\nWe were so saddened to hear about Ed Herman. What a terrible loss.\n\nEFTA00914548\n\nWe understand that you want to live with comfort and financial security. We want that for you as well.\n\nIf you want to discuss Max stepping down as Trustee, Harry would need to meet with you to discuss that. From our past experience, it's clear that a professional mediator would be needed at this meeting.\n\nAt this point we don't feel comfortable approving Richard Kahn to replace Max as Trustee.\n\nLove, Avi, Diane and Harry

I just don't understand this. I've explained the facts in detail, repeatedly, with no response. You've told me that you have a different understanding of the basic facts, but haven't told me what it is, or what are the questions to which you want answers other than what I have told you. That is why communication cannot proceed. So, yes, frustrating.\n\nEvidently you regard this as an adversarial proceeding, requiring a mediator. I don't understand this either. I thought we were a family discussing matters relating to us. I have no idea what a mediator would before. Mediating what? Another reason for my frustration.\n\nAs for Bainco and Max, I have explained in part what they have been doing, causing me plenty of harm. In part. As I've told you, there is a lot more. But what I have told you is more than enough to explain that they are not reliable sources who can be trusted.\n\nIf you want them to answer your questions, OK, but it would seem rather strange if I were to ask them about your financial affairs -- a matter into which I've of course never inquired, except by asking you questions if they came up. So I find all of this quite strange. If I have questions about your lives and circumstances, I would ask you, not some investment firm or lawyer, and I wouldn't request a mediator. I don't understand why it is different in my case, and this is something else I'd like to know the explanation for.\n\nSo, yes, frustrating. For these reasons.\n\nD

Dear Doddoy,\n\nWe've tried to talk to you about your financial situation several times over the past couple of years, in person, by phone, and by e-mail. The process has been extremely unpleasant for us, and we presume for you as well. More importantly, it has not led to any enlightenment on any of our parts. Much of what we've tried to say you have flatly denied; some of it we think you simply haven't understood. You seem absolutely convinced that your beliefs are correct and absolutely uninterested in trying to look at the situation in other ways, to the extent that you can't even remember these exchanges. Much of what you've said to us conflicts directly with our personal knowledge of your history and with legal and financial advice from every source we've heard from. So the conversations lead only to more stress and heartache.\n\nWe are not willing to continue trying to discuss this with you unless something changes. One change would be to include a professional in the conversation who can resolve our differences in belief about basic facts. However, you have apparently decided that because you disapprove of some of the suggestions made by your former lawyer and financial managers — many of which were based on choices you and Mommoy had made previously -- you will now not believe anything they tell you. That leaves us with no recourse to determine the truth about anything that happened between 2007 and 2016.\n\nWe have suggested a mediator as a last resort. Perhaps with a mediator we can at least listen to each other's beliefs and perspectives, even if we can't come to agreement on key points. Perhaps a mediator could even help us find a way to investigate the questions of fact and come to some conclusions that we could all accept.\n\nShort of being able to talk to you openly, it's very important to the three of us to protect you from future financial catastrophe. We have been trying our best to do this, and will continue to try, regardless of what happens with our communication. We\n\nEFTA00914544\n\nbelieve that Eric Menoyo designed your estate plan properly to protect the interests of all parties, and we will continue to work to ensure that the plan is administered in a faithful and professional way.\n\nWe also wanted to say that we have a different interpretation of how we have balanced respect, privacy, and autonomy, versus questions and interference, in our family history. You tell us that you deeply resent being asked questions when you request financial withdrawals, and you deeply resent our questions about your financial situation. You say that you are the only one being questioned in this way. But we don't believe that's the case. Historically, as a family we have been open with each other about our individual financial situations; we have watched out for each other and stepped in if we felt it was needed; and on the most concrete level, any request to access funds from any of the trusts has always required an explanation to go along with it.\n\nIn Avi's case, you and Mommoy interfered to tell her that something was going very wrong with Sandi and that she had to get professional help; to practically force her to go meet with a lawyer Mommoy found for her when she became convinced that Avi's marriage to Jon was causing harm; and to order Avi to go see a doctor and get on medication when she confessed that she couldn't handle things. That is: when Mommoy saw Avi doing fine, she didn't pry or interfere. When she saw her falling apart, she stepped in to help.\n\nIn Diane's case, she discussed her financial situation with Mommoy in a very open way on many, many occasions, leading Mommoy to offer her things like washing machines (we all know how that turned out) and more significantly, help with rent payments during a few years in Mexico, during a period when: Oxfam had stopped paying the rent, Gmo had stopped receiving his stipend as a grad student, and Diane was still suffering from a considerable salary cut imposed by Oxfam after the move to Mexico. Diane accepted her offer, which was a huge temporary help while she got herself back on her feet.\n\nFurthermore, on the occasions when Diane has asked Bainco for money from the trust that is in her name, she is always asked to explain exactly what it is for. This happens even though the amounts have never been very large. If anything looks odd, the trustees come back to her with questions. Harry once even phoned her because what she was asking for seemed so strange and he was concerned that something was wrong (in case you are wondering what was indeed going on, it was a small Mexican peso loan to a friend in trouble, which Diane couldn't do by other means because she was traveling at the time, and it couldn't wait until she got back home). Diane has not found this questioning to be humiliating or prying - she assumes it is the terms of the trust and the trustees are just doing their jobs.\n\nIn Harry's case, at one point in the mid-1990s he unexpectedly owed $60,000 due to the Alternative Minimum Tax as a result of receiving stock options. He discussed this with Mommoy and her accountant, and they decided she would lend him the money to pay the taxes and he would pay her back once he had a chance to exercise and liquidate the stock options, several months later.\n\nIn the current situation, the reason we are asking you questions now (and never before) is that now we are hearing from you repeatedly that your financial situation is dire. We decided to ask you about your financial circumstances - not lightly, as we said in one of our many emails, but after much thought, given that we could see that your concem about it was causing you a great deal of stress and was leading to you taking important and possibly unnecessarily radical decisions. We continue to feel that you are misinterpreting your financial situation, and that this is causing you considerable anguish. It pains us greatly to see this, as we've said before.\n\nWe can tell from your tax requests that you have been spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on personal expenses, even after having successfully eliminated the extra costs that you have mentioned as a drain on your resources (the Cape house, the gifts, Anthony's salary, etc). This is far out of alignment with what we know about your lifestyle. You and Valeria should live in comfort together -- no need to adhere to your old, fairly austere living conditions -- but your expenditures seem to go far beyond that, and seem to keep rising. This makes us worry and makes us want to intervene to try to help. It also makes the trustees worry that you are not managing your finances with attention to your possible lifelong needs. Nothing in the long and detailed letters you've sent us can begin to explain why your personal spending has shot up the way it has. We can see only little pieces of your situation, because of the secretive posture you've adopted in recent years, but the pieces we do see suggest a set of problems very different from the ones you've described.\n\nWe hope this helps to explain our position and our real concern. You are right that in our last emails (and in this one) we haven't gone point by point through your affirmations, explaining our different understanding of the basic facts, but as we said at the beginning of this email, we tried to do that in the past and it didn't work. We truly hope we can find a way to talk openly about the situation.\n\nLove, Avi, Diane and Harry

May be missing something. I don't see anything mentioned below\n\nIt's a very troubling situation, as I've outlined, and I hope we can settle it quickly. I'd like to get back to my life and work without this constant dark cloud and continual aggravation.\n\nIt's true that it looks simple to me, but I'll wait to hear from you. Soon I hope.\n\nD

Dear Doddoy,\n\nPlease find attached a reply to your emails which we spoke with you about before Christmas.\n\nAs we've said before, based on past experience we have a lot of doubts about how well an email exchange will work. We did attempt, a few months ago, to use email to address one small, concrete issue: the loan from the marital trust and its conditions and interest rate. We thought it would be simple to resolve our different understandings, but in the end our multiple communications—even including an explanatory memo from the lawyer who set up the loan—did not manage to clarify things at all. Nonetheless, since you've asked several times for an email exchange about the broader issues, we're willing to try.\n\nWe know that what you asked for was for us to go through your detailed emails point by point and tell you what we disagree with and why. That isn't exactly what we've done here. Instead, this is our best attempt to explain the history and circumstances as we understand them.\n\nWhy have we done this? For a number of reasons. We think that many of your underlying assumptions are far off from reality, and that your understanding of the past, the present and what we are saying about these financial issues is deeply distorted. We want to start by looking at the larger, long-term issues, where we feel you have simply rewritten history.\n\nThe attached narrative is our best attempt to do this. Please keep in mind that it is based only on our memory and a handful of documents we've seen through the years. The numbers in particular are all rough approximations, since of course we don't have access to your legal and financial files. You may very well feel we're mistaken about some details. But in order to address those issues and come to an agreement on even the basic facts, we'd really like to meet face to face, with the help of the people who actually have the documents and the information to determine whether the things each of us believe are true or not. And, with a neutral mediator, who can ensure that we all are able to listen to and understand what the other parties are trying to say.\n\nLove, Avi, Diane and Harry

Forwarded email regarding marital trusts and financial concerns.

Can you please take a look at the attachment and let us know what you think and how to deal with this.