The other thing that’s really unique to South Dakota is its quiet trust laws. This means that the settlor—the person setting up the trust—can indicate inside the trust document how much or how little the beneficiaries are allowed to know about the trust. They can even make it so that the beneficiaries never know anything about the trust that mom or dad, or someone else, has set up and left for them.
We find that a lot of really wealthy families may not want to run into a situation where they’re just leaving trust funds for children who probably shouldn’t have full access or shouldn’t know that they have this money or these funds to rely on and depend on. They want that kind of privacy because they think it’s going to protect their children if they aren’t expecting that mom and dad are going to continue to take care of them.