Welcome to Prairie Trust’s quarterly newsletter, Prairie Perspective. Our goal is to keep you updated on our latest happenings and provide you with financial tips and resources.

Enjoy!

A Message from the President:

How has our trust business changed five months into a pandemic? While we started working remotely, our offices reopened on June 1, and I gave our staff the option to work from home or work remotely. Currently, on any given day about half our staff chooses to work remotely and half are in the office. We have discovered we can effectively service our clients remotely, but our face-to-face client meetings have significantly declined. We still schedule face-to-face client meetings, and when we meet, we have a plexi-glass divider and wear masks. Telephone, email and text messages have become our main means of communication.

Our trust services continue to grow, and we have added staff during the pandemic. In June, we added two new Prairie Trust assistant administrators – Lauren Hanson is now assisting Michele Young and Autumn Bartlett is assisting Nancy Schoenberg. Both have been great additions, and their hiring will allow us to continue to grow our trust administration capabilities. Real estate management in trusts and estates has increased, and we currently manage about 60 parcels. To address this growth, we promoted Matt Woyak to full-time real estate administrator. Matt is supported by Jean Durham who provides legal review and administrative support. In September, we are expecting to add a full-time fiduciary tax administrator. This will further strengthen our tax expertise and allow Diem Nguyen, who manages our trust administration group, to spend more time focusing on our estate settlement work. Death continues to be a trigger for new corporate trustee opportunities.

Another area that continues to grow during the pandemic is our special needs trust administration. We are unique in having a full-time special needs trust administrator and assistant in Nancy and Autumn. With our relationship with Life Navigators, we are able to manage small pooled community trusts as well as larger individually drafted special needs trusts. Life Navigators has expanded its special needs trust services to include third party trusts, first party trusts for individuals under age 65 and first party trusts for individuals over age 65. We are an alternative to Wispact and offer greater investment flexibility and social services (through Life Navigators) than you will find at Wispact.

Our directed and delegated trust services have stalled a bit during the pandemic. While we continue to receive some new opportunities, the number of inquiries has slowed. Perhaps this is because high net worth individuals or outside investment advisers want to meet in person and this is difficult to do during a pandemic, perhaps people do not want to make changes during a time of crisis, or perhaps this is just because it is the summer. Our Director of Fiduciary Sales, Terry Doyle, would be happy to address any personal trust inquiries. You can reach Terry at (262) 953-2435 or tdoyle@waukeshabank.com.

Finally, an area of personal interest is trust legislation. Just as the Wisconsin legislature went into hiatus when the pandemic hit, so did the trust legislation study groups that I participate in. There will be no further developments in 2020. However, 2021 is certain to be a different story. The two-year Wisconsin biennial budget will likely take center stage at the beginning of 2021, but I expect the Wisconsin legislature will be willing to consider a trust code trailer bill and a domestic asset protection statute later in 2021. If any of your organizations are interested in discussing Wisconsin Trust Code updates, Terry and I would be happy to visit with your staff. Please contact Terry if you are interested.

Very truly yours,