TOC-23 Trustee Services, LLC is an independent New Hampshire fiduciary practice whose principals serve personally as trustee for family trusts. Every trust depends on who holds its trustee seat — yet the seat is too often filled by default: a family member who inherits the burden, the liability, and the family friction, or a distant trust department that treats the family like an account number. Our fiduciaries hold the seat the way it was meant to be held — professionally, accountably, and with pricing that is simple to understand.
For families who work with TOC-23 as their family office, the trustee seat comes with something few outside institutions can offer on day one: an intimate, working familiarity with your wishes, your goals, your balance sheet, and your family's dynamics — because we operate inside them every day. Distribution requests are weighed by people who understand what the trust was built to do. Planning, administration, and investment direction are coordinated by one team instead of translated between institutions. And guidance arrives with the full context of your situation behind it — not a file opened last week.
Where a trust is administered — and who holds the trustee seat — shapes its duration, its tax posture, and how cleanly investment and administrative responsibilities can be divided. New Hampshire gives settlors one of the most deliberate trust frameworks in the country.
New Hampshire trust law expressly accommodates directed trusts, trust advisors, and trust protectors — and permits trusts of unlimited duration.
New Hampshire imposes no state income tax on a trust's interest, dividends, or capital gains — and a properly structured non-grantor New Hampshire trust with a New Hampshire trustee may, depending on the facts, remove undistributed income and gains from home-state taxation.
Under a directed-trust structure, investment direction can rest with a designated Investment Director while the trustee carries administration. Families keep the advisors they trust; the seat stays professional and accountable.
TOC-23 Trustee Services does not provide legal or tax advice. Whether a New Hampshire trust changes any state's taxation of trust income depends on the trust's terms, the residence of settlors, fiduciaries, and beneficiaries, and each state's law. Consult your own counsel before acting.
Every engagement is built around one of three base roles, each held personally by a named fiduciary — not by a department — and serviced by the full firm. The role determines the scope of responsibility — and, with it, the trustee services fee.
Our fiduciary carries the administrative spine of the trust while investment and distribution authority rest with directors named in the instrument.
Our fiduciary holds the full trustee office — administration, discretionary distribution decisions, and investment oversight — where the family wants one accountable professional fiduciary.
Our fiduciary serves alongside an individual co-trustee — adding professional administration, continuity, and a second fiduciary judgment while the family keeps a seat at the table.
Where the trust instrument creates them, these can be added to a base role — each an annual add-on itemized in your proposal.
Trust protector engagements are accepted only on a standalone basis — our fiduciaries will not serve as trust protector of any trust on which they hold another fiduciary role, so the protector's oversight of the trustee remains independent in fact. Serving in these capacities, including the Investment Director role, requires a current investment advisory agreement with Inflection Capital Management, LLC, dba TOC-23.
Corporate trustees typically charge a percentage of trust assets — a fee that grows with your portfolio whether or not the work does. TOC-23 Trustee Services prices the work itself: a flat annual fee set by three observable factors and stated in your engagement's Schedule A.
Administrative trustee, full/sole trustee, or co-trustee. The fee tracks the responsibility held: a full trustee carries more decision-making burden and more liability than a directed administrative trustee, and the schedule reflects that honestly.
Every engagement is assigned Tier 1 (Standard), Tier 2 (Complex), or Tier 3 (Highly Complex) based on the trust's assets and beneficiary structure. The tier is set at commencement and reassessed only when a defined complexity event occurs, with written notice before any change takes effect.
Trust value places the engagement in one of four bands, reassessed once a year based on the prior year-end value. Trusts above $100M are priced by separate written negotiation.
The firm's complete standard trustee services fee rate schedule is maintained in our Pricing Methodology and is available to any settlor or qualified beneficiary on request, together with a written proposal for your trust's specific configuration — start the conversation.
The trustee fee is the visible line. The value sits in what the structure does — state tax it can lawfully keep out of the portfolio, claims it can help withstand, and arguments it can keep from ever starting. Three examples, with the assumptions shown.
Ask the professionals who handle trusts and estates, and the pattern is consistent. In 2026, STEP — the global professional body for trust and estate practitioners — found 41% of advisors reporting a rise in family inheritance disputes. And the seat itself is a job: Empathy's 2025 research found that executors — usually a close family member — spend an average of roughly 20 months settling a loved one's affairs, and its 2024 study found 21% of the bereaved became estranged from family after a loss.
Sources: STEP research report on family inheritance disputes (2026; 533 trust and estate practitioners surveyed), in which 41% reported an increase in family inheritance disputes; Empathy, The Grief Tax (2025 annual research report), finding executors spend an average of approximately 20 months settling a loved one's affairs; Empathy, The Cost of Dying (2024 annual report), in which 21% of bereaved respondents reported becoming estranged from family. Survey findings reflect professional perception and self-reported experience, not adjudicated outcomes.
The lawyers who litigate broken trusts describe the same origin story again and again: a family member placed in the trustee seat — chosen out of love, or to save a fee — now holding power over siblings without the records, the communication habits, or the distance the role demands. Even silence becomes evidence: a trustee who goes quiet out of grief or inexperience is soon accused not of saying nothing, but of hiding something. Which is why the standard professional guidance has become blunt: where there is real property, a business, a blended family, or old friction, use a neutral fiduciary.
Sources: S. H. Malach, “The Coming Probate Storm: How America's Demographic Shifts Are Reshaping Litigation Over Estates,” American Bar Association, Probate & Property (March/April 2026), including the observation that a trustee's silence can transform from “you're not telling us anything” into “you're hiding something”; and published commentary from practicing trust-and-estate litigators, including Trust Law Partners, Hackard Law, and Smith, Gambrell & Russell, on dispute patterns involving family-member trustees. General observations, not legal advice.
State income tax is one of the quietest drags on a family portfolio — it compounds against you, year after year, whether or not a dollar is ever spent. In the highest-tax states, top rates on investment income run from roughly 9% to more than 13%. A properly structured non-grantor New Hampshire trust with a New Hampshire trustee may — depending on the family's facts and home state — place the trust's undistributed income and gains beyond that reach entirely, because New Hampshire imposes no state tax on a trust's interest, dividends, or capital gains. Compounded over years and generations, the difference is not a rounding error.
Illustrative discussion only. Whether any trust removes income or gains from state taxation depends on the trust's terms; the residence of settlors, fiduciaries, and beneficiaries; distributions, which can carry income out to a beneficiary's home state; and each state's law. The result requires a non-grantor trust — a grantor trust's income remains taxed to the settlor personally, regardless of the trust's situs. Federal income tax applies in either case. Outcomes are fact-specific and not assured. Not tax or legal advice.
Many trusts name the beneficiary as their own sole trustee. It feels efficient — until a creditor, a lawsuit, or a divorce arrives. A beneficiary who can write their own distribution checks is a beneficiary whose trust assets could be deemed reachable by a court — the argument is simple: whatever a beneficiary can take at will, a creditor may be able to take as well. Placing one of our fiduciaries in the trustee or distribution-director seat — independent discretion, held personally by a named professional — restores the architecture discretionary trusts are designed around: the beneficiary cannot compel a distribution, and what a beneficiary cannot compel, a creditor generally cannot compel either.
Asset-protection outcomes depend on the trust's terms, governing law, the nature of the claim, and timing — structures must be in place before a claim arises, and transfers made to defeat existing creditors can be unwound. Nothing here is a guarantee of protection; coordinate with your own counsel.
A questionable distribution request is easy to grant and costly to refuse — especially when the trustee is a parent or sibling who will sit across the table at the next holiday. Refusals turn personal; approvals quietly drain the trust; either way, the settlor's intent erodes. Our fiduciary takes that seat professionally: every request is measured against the standard the settlor actually wrote, decisions are explained in writing, and the friction that would otherwise land inside the family is absorbed by a professional who can carry it.
Trust instruments are built to last decades; families change faster. Many grantors deliberately keep the document flexible and supply direction in softer form — two documents we help families develop:
Both are non-binding: they guide without amending the trust, which is exactly what lets the instrument itself stay flexible. We develop them with the family and coordinate with counsel so the guidance remains consistent with the trust instrument.
Not every advantage needs a case study. Engagements routinely deliver:
Fiduciary appointments are held individually by the people below and serviced through TOC-23 Trustee Services, LLC. You will know exactly who holds your trust's seat — and that person will know your trust.
Holds the firm's fiduciary appointments — administrative, distribution, co-trustee, and full/sole trustee roles — and leads trust administration end to end: accountings, distributions, beneficiary communications, and coordination with each family's tax and legal counsel.
Serves as Investment Director where a trust instrument designates one — directing trust investments within the directed-trust architecture and overseeing investment policy, implementation, and reporting for trust portfolios.
A call with Jim about the trust, the role contemplated, and whether the fit is right — in both directions.
We review the instrument and assets, confirm the complexity tier and value band, and deliver a written fee proposal.
Before signing, you receive the Combined Fee Summary — every fee touching the trust on one page — then the engagement agreement with its Schedule A.
We work with your counsel on proper drafting and execution of the appointment, then establish the records, accounts, valuations, and compliance calendar — and the trust is under administration.
Whether you are establishing a new trust, moving situs, or replacing a trustee, the first step is the same: a direct conversation about the trust and the role. Bring your counsel — we prefer it.
