ardentrust.com Reviews 5

DO NOT USE ARDEN TRUST FOR FAMILY TRUST!!!
Incompetent "Vice Presidents"...repeatedly provide wrong information. Information kept changing. Explanations based on inaccessible information. We had a relatively small trust that Arden Trust agreed to close. It took 8 months for them to make 3 equal distributions after they agreed to dissolve the trust. No documentation of rationale for their arbitrary "rules". Beneficiaries not allowed to speak to their "legal" department (cited as the reason for all incomprehensible rules). Cost us tens of thousands of $ in capital gains taxes because of their bad advice, miscommunication and mysterious protocols. Our financial advisors are all shaking their heads. Now they are telling us that 2 beneficiaries owe the third beneficiary $$.

My mother's estate is primarily handled thru morgan Stanley, who recommended Arden Trust to handle her estate. They have been a nightmare.Mom left the house to me and I have held the deed for 3 months. I am STILL denied access. Communication is zero and even calling the current manager gets no response. Stay away from this company! They do not care what your loved one wanted and just sit back and collect the money

I encountered profound incompetence and a complete lack of responsiveness from Arden Trust Company. After investing significant time and resources to establish a trust, Arden failed to address my accountant's timely requests, directly causing delays that necessitated restarting the entire process. This negligence resulted in unnecessary expenditures exceeding tens of thousands of dollars. Furthermore, over the past 18 months, I have been entangled in an endless cycle of attempting a straightforward withdrawal of funds initially used to set up the account. Despite repeatedly completing the required forms, Arden returns them blank for re-execution, only to vanish for months without follow-up. I strongly advise against engaging with this company; their operational failures render them unfit to conduct business.

My mothers trust is with Arden. The fees are ridiculous when the stocks are managed by a third party. They charge me a fee for every transaction even though they do no work the financial advisor does it all. Plus I have the other fee a percentage of the account. I feel like they are double dipping. They are required to do payouts over 10 years. I've been waiting for the first payout for over 4 months. They keep making excuses why it hasn't occurred yet blaming my financial advisor when I know he is just waiting on them. I feel like they are intentionally with holding the money. Avoid them at all cost.

Arden Trust took over administration of my great-uncle's trust, which was originally in a Chicago bank. They announced a new charge: 1% of trust principal/year for their services. This would have raised their yearly fee from @$4000 to @$50,000/year. When our lawyer found this was not allowed by the trust terms, they backed down.
The trust terminated as of 2/2021, when the principal should have been divided among trustees. Several trustees contacted Arden to request that the stocks and bonds in the trust not be sold until 2022. Arden ignored us and sold everything in March, 2021, placing the proceeds, our principal, in a bank account paying no interest. As a result my income from the trust dropped from @$24,000/year in 2020 to $2,000 this year, leaving me short of money. (I’m retired.)
In April they promised to send us papers to sign to open the way for distribution. Their distribution date passed. More promises and more missed deadline ensued. What was happening? We got updates about their problems with distribution only when our lawyers intervened. (Expensive!) Meanwhile the stock market went up, so that if our money had continued to be invested through this year as we had requested, it would have appreciated in value by about 28%.