How do I protect an inheritance for a drug/alcohol addicted person?

I'm attorney Amber Jade F. Johnson, and you need to know how to protect an inheritance for someone who is maybe drug addicted, or addicted to alcohol, or just spends money like it's water flowing through their fingers. In these kinds of cases, when I sit with a family and talk to them, again, we need to come up with solutions to help them leave money to these types of beneficiaries, but not in a way that it will help them hurt themselves, potentially, or cause a problem. 
                    
What we recommend is setting up a trust for that beneficiary. This can be underneath a will. It's a sub-trust and a last will and testament, or it can be a sub-trust in a revocable trust. In the trust for the beneficiary we allow the trustee to manage money for the beneficiary, and sometimes that's for their lifetime. When there isn't really a lot of assets, and so the family is concerned about the expense of a trust, one of the answers that the family could choose is to set up an annuity for that beneficiary. This allows the inheritance to purchase an annuity, which will provide the beneficiary a monthly check for the rest of their life, and they cannot assign it, they can't use it as collateral, they can't give it away to anyone, and they don't outlive it. The nice thing about that is the trustee has not involvement with the beneficiary, which, again, is sometimes a real concern with family members about who's going to be in charge. Annuities can get a bad rap, but sometimes they can be a good solution for this type of problem. 
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