Your Will Is Not Enough. Most Advisors Won’t Tell You That.

A golf course conversation that revealed a gap costing Indian families more than any tax they will ever pay.

A few days ago, on the golf course, I found myself in one of those conversations that starts casually and ends with me thinking about it for the rest of the week. A chartered accountant friend and a businessman. The CA asked what I do. I mentioned Entrust Family Office, the work we do on succession, the trust structures we help families build. He seemed interested. Then he asked a pointed question: whether we also act as trustee.

I said yes. We have our own trusteeship services company, and we do assume the role of corporate trustee for client families.

What followed surprised me. He said he generally does not recommend trusts to his clients. He advises them to write a will, register it, and stop there. When I pressed him on why he was uncomfortable recommending a trust, the answer was not convincing. It was not wrong exactly, but it revealed something I keep encountering: even well-meaning professionals in India still misunderstand how a private family trust actually works. And that misunderstanding, carried from advisor to client, repeated across thousands of families, is costing people far more than the tax they are trying to save.

Let me say clearly what the difference actually is, because it matters and it is not complicated. A will is a transfer document. A trust is a governance document. A will speaks only after you are dead. A trust can speak while you are alive, if you are incapacitated, after your death, and across generations. That is not a minor distinction. That is the entire difference between wealth that gets transferred and wealth that gets stewarded.

To be fair to the will: every person with assets should have one. Even families who build comprehensive trust structures usually still need a will to cover personal assets, residual holdings, and future-acquired property that sits outside the trust. Since the 2025 legislative change that removed the probate requirement in most situations, wills are easier to act upon than before. That is a genuine improvement. But convenience should not be confused with completeness.

A will has structural limits that become visible at exactly the moments when you most need structure to hold. It becomes effective only after death, which means it does nothing if the founder falls into a coma, develops dementia, suffers a stroke, or becomes otherwise unable to manage their affairs while still alive. It does not create an operating mechanism for decisions. It does not resolve family disputes; it frequently creates them. It does not replace governance. And it is a poor instrument for any family where the question is not simply who gets what, but how wealth should be held, protected, administered, and released across time. When the answer to that question is complicated, and for most serious families it is, the will is not the right tool.

This is the gap that most Indian succession planning falls into. Families plan for death. Almost none plan seriously for incapacity. A will is silent while the founder is alive but no longer functional. A trust continues to operate through its trustees and the terms of the deed. In my view, incapacity planning alone is sufficient reason for most significant families to consider a trust structure.

A private family trust under Indian law is a live structure. Under the Indian Trusts Act, property is held by trustees for the benefit of specified beneficiaries, and where the trust relates to immovable property, it must be declared in writing and registered. The law requires trustees to fulfil the purpose of the trust, obey the directions of the settlor, acquaint themselves thoroughly with the trust property, and protect its title. This is not a passive arrangement. It is an active, ongoing governance mechanism.

What the trust can do that a will cannot: it separates legal ownership of assets from their beneficial enjoyment. It allows the settlor to define who the beneficiaries are, the conditions under which distributions are made, the timing and staging of those distributions, what happens during incapacity, what happens after death, how trustees are replaced, what happens in the event of family conflict, and how the arrangement should continue across multiple generations. It can say: this corpus is available for education but not for reckless leverage. This house can be occupied but not sold without conditions. This beneficiary should receive more support if health deteriorates. This business voting power should remain coordinated. A will gives an address. A trust gives an operating manual.

There are two distinctions within trust structures that professional advice frequently glosses over, and both of them matter enormously.

The first is between revocable and irrevocable trusts. A revocable trust can be altered or dissolved by the settlor. Under Section 61 of the Income-tax Act, income from a revocable transfer is taxed back to the settlor, meaning the tax benefit is limited. A revocable trust is useful where the founder wants flexibility and is not yet ready to permanently relinquish control. It can serve as a transitional structure. But families should not overestimate its protective value. If the settlor can call the assets back, courts and creditors will look at substance, not form. An irrevocable trust, properly structured, is considerably more robust, but only if the transfer is genuine, the documentation is sound, the trusteeship is credible, and the purpose is legitimate. A trust that is constructed to look real while keeping control unchanged is not a trust. It is theatre, and it will be treated as such.

The second is between determinate and discretionary trusts. In a determinate trust, beneficiaries and their shares are known and specified. The structure is transparent and predictable. Trustees are taxed in a representative capacity broadly in the same manner as the beneficiaries they represent. This works well for families that want certainty and clear arithmetic.

A discretionary trust gives trustees the power to decide which beneficiary receives what, when, and in what amount. Under Section 164 of the Income-tax Act, income in a discretionary trust where beneficiaries’ shares are indeterminate is generally taxed at the maximum marginal rate, subject to specific exceptions. That sounds unappealing until you think about why discretion exists. If one child is financially independent, another has serious health challenges, a third has shown poor financial judgment, and a fourth is going through a divorce, a rigid equal distribution is not fair, it is merely equal. Discretion is sometimes the only mechanism that can genuinely protect fairness over time. Equal is not always the same as fair, and any structure that cannot distinguish between the two will eventually produce outcomes nobody wanted.

There are several situations where I would consider a trust not merely advisable but close to essential, and none of them are exotic.

The first is families with a child who has special needs or lifelong support requirements. A will that transfers assets outright to such a beneficiary solves the ownership question while creating a much harder administration problem. Who manages the money? Under what conditions? For what purposes? Who protects the beneficiary from exploitation, by relatives, caregivers, or opportunists, after the parents are gone? A properly drafted trust can answer all of this. It can earmark funds for healthcare, housing, therapy, attendants, and long-term support. It can name successor trustees. It can build in safeguards that no will can provide.

The second is families with daughters in complex marriages, or sons who have remarried, or founders who have concerns about assets leaving the bloodline through marital breakdown. Many Indian families avoid saying this plainly, but the concern is real and planning must address reality rather than sentiment. A trust can separate beneficial enjoyment from absolute transfer. It can provide for use, residence, and support without forcing immediate uncontrolled vesting. It can stagger distributions, protect the corpus from being drawn into divorce proceedings, and preserve intergenerational intent without requiring the family to make embarrassing declarations about their children’s circumstances.

The third is any situation where informational concentration is the real risk, where one person knows everything about the financial affairs and everyone else knows almost nothing. A trust, combined with proper records, family governance, and a letter of wishes, creates a structure that continues to operate even when the person at its centre is no longer present or functional. This is, in my experience, the most underestimated succession risk in Indian families: not the tax, not the title disputes, but the fact that the knowledge of how the wealth works disappears with the person who built it.

There is a myth worth addressing directly. Some people assume that assets placed in a trust become untouchable. They do not. A properly constituted irrevocable trust with independent trusteeship offers meaningful protection compared to outright personal ownership, but that protection comes from the quality of the structure, not from the existence of the document. If a trust was created to defraud creditors, if the settlor continues to treat trust assets as personal property, or if the structure is effectively a sham, the protection disappears. The Indian Trusts Act itself makes clear that a trust created to defeat creditors is invalid against them. Protection through structure is real. Protection through fiction is not.

The question of who serves as trustee matters more than most families appreciate. An individual trustee may be entirely trustworthy and still cause structural problems: they age, fall ill, come under family pressure, lose interest, become emotionally unable to remain neutral, or simply cannot administer a complex structure spanning multiple asset classes and multiple beneficiaries. The Indian Trusts Act allows any person capable of holding property to be a trustee, and where discretion is involved, the trustee must be competent to contract, but competence to contract is not the same as competence to administer.

A corporate trustee brings something an individual cannot: continuity, documented process, neutrality, institutional memory, and the capacity to serve across generations without the personal vulnerabilities that every human being carries. This is not a statement against individual trustees, who are appropriate in many contexts. It is a statement about what serious, multi-generational trust structures require. It is precisely why we built trusteeship capability at Entrust, because we observed, over years of this work, that the weakest link in most trust structures was not the deed. It was the administration.

Tax is a genuine consideration in trust structuring and it deserves honest treatment. The tax outcome depends significantly on the nature of the trust: whether it is revocable or irrevocable, whether it is specific or discretionary, and how income is attributed and distributed. These are real variables with real consequences that any competent advisor needs to model carefully.

But succession planning that begins and ends with tax has its priorities in the wrong order. India currently has no inheritance tax, estate duty was abolished in 1985, and some families use this as a reason to defer all planning. That is a mistake. Even without estate duty, families still face transmission friction, title disputes, capital gains on future asset sales, stamp duty complexity in some states, asset tracing problems, and the entirely avoidable cost of litigation. A family that optimises tax and fails governance has still planned badly. The right sequence is: build the right structure, then optimise within it. Not the reverse.

The golf course conversation stayed with me not because the CA was wrong to prefer wills, but because of how firmly and casually he dismissed the alternative without really engaging with its depth. That is a pattern I recognise. It is common across Indian professional advice, and it has real consequences for the families who receive it.

India does not have a shortage of wealth. It has a shortage of well-structured succession. The two instruments, will and trust, are not competitors. For most families with any complexity at all, the right answer is both: the will handling what the trust cannot or should not hold, the trust providing the operating architecture that the will was never designed to supply.

A will transfers. A trust stewards. For families who have built something worth protecting across generations, the distinction is not academic. It is the entire difference between leaving an inheritance and leaving a system.

If you have significant wealth, or a family with any real complexity, a vulnerable beneficiary, a business, property in multiple states, children abroad, a second marriage, concentrated assets, or simply a founder who holds all the knowledge, the question worth asking is not whether you have a will. It is whether your current planning is designed for continuity, or merely for transfer. Those are different things. And the gap between them is where most avoidable family suffering in Indian succession quietly lives.