What is a trust fund?
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A trust fund is an investment account which is managed by someone (the trustee) other than the person whom it is intended to benefit (the beneficiary).
There are various reasons one might do that. Here are a few examples:
* If you’re giving a lot of money to a small child, and want the money to be spent on important things like a college education rather than blown on digital items in a cell phone game, you might not want to give the child *control* of the money until they’re an adult.
* If you’re a politician and want to invest some money in the stock market, but don’t want to create a conflict of interest where people might worry about you making decisions to benefit your own investments rather than the country at large, you might want to have the money controlled by someone who isn’t going to tell you what stocks they bought.
* If you’re setting up some sort of fund whose ultimate beneficiaries haven’t been determined yet–“compensation for anyone who turns out to have been harmed by such-and-such chemical leak”, “prize for whoever first lands a man on Mars”, etc.–then someone has to manage that money in the mean time.
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