The reason nobody writes a number is that a trust may run for fifty years and a number set in 1994 is meaningless by 2024, so the law uses a standard instead, and a court decides.

And a court decides it by looking at what the trustee actually did.

Imogen instructed a man called Bertram Cooke, who has been valuing fiduciary services for thirty-one years and who charged four thousand two hundred dollars for an eleven-page report, and his report is the single most devastating document in this entire account and it does not contain one angry word.

Here is what the Thorne 1994 Trust actually required a trustee to do.