The certification of trust follows Schedule A and doesn't have my address on it. Is Schedule A considered part of the declaration or certification?
With the caveat that any opinion I'm giving is based on Kentucky law and that it's best to speak with your own attorney who is familiar with your own state's trust laws, I can say that you should be able to amend a trust Schedule without any signature, and it isn't truly even an "amendment."
The way that I draft trusts for my clients, the actual trust itself is the "declaration of trust" document, which must be signed and notarized by only the grantor. The "certification of trust" is simply a short form which summarizes certain terms of the trust, includes certain changeable information such as the trust's current address, and only needs to be signed by one of the currently acting trustees (including a grantor who is also a trustee). The purpose of a "certification of trust" is to provide a summary of some of the trust terms that you can provide to, for instance, a bank, which needs to know that your trust exists and what some of the terms are, but doesn't need to know ALL of the trust's terms. And, again, it's a document that can be changed easily without actually making a trust "amendment," so you can put things like the trust address in there.
So what are "schedules"? Well, they're documents which are referenced within the body of the trust itself (the "declaration of trust") which contain information that's incorporated by that reference. The reason you use schedules is because they contain information that you might want to change or add to without having to do a trust amendment. You can have schedules with names, such as "schedule of beneficiaries" (whose purpose should be obvious), or you can have schedules that are listed by letter "Schedule A" or "Schedule B" and so on. These are a traditional trust drafting tool, and don't always contain the same things, depending on the trust.
For my clients, the only schedule referenced in the trust itself is "Schedule A", and it includes the trust's property. Thus, every time that you add a firearm to the trust, you simply create a new Schedule A and add the property to the list. My trusts include information like trustees and beneficiaries in the body of the trust, but I've seen at least beneficiaries set up in schedules instead.
If a term of the trust is part of the declaration of trust, then to change it, you must "amend" the trust. That's easy to do. You simply write a new document that outlines the change you're making and sign and notarize it. Then you keep a copy of that with the original trust. After you pass away, someone wanting to understand the trust must read it together with the amendments to understand it. What you can do if you make a lot of amendments is to eventually make a "restatement" of a trust, which is a document that incorporates all the changes and actually REPLACES the original declaration of trust. Then the original and amendments can be destroyed, since the restatement becomes the new trust document.
Again, some of what I'm saying may be specific to Kentucky trust law--I'm not familiar with the trust laws of other states. And it may also differ based on who drafted your trust, since just like contracts, there are many different ways to draft a legal trust that can be equally valid.
If your trust's address is in a Schedule, then you should be able to update it as often as necessary without a bunch of signatures and hassle.
If your trustees are named in the actual declaration of trust, then you generally need a trust amendment to change/add/remove trustees. That's not hard to do, though, as discussed above. And once the transfer has been approved to your trust, the trust is the owner of the NFA firearm, no matter who is added or removed as trustees. The ATF does not have to be notified of those actions. They're not doing background checks on trustees anyway.
This is all very educational.
I hope so. I apologize if I came across as snarky before--I do want people to understand how all of this works, because the more people that own NFA firearms, the more "normalized" NFA ownership becomes. And the trust route is a great ownership method. I also understand exercising great caution when it comes to the ATF and their sometimes arbitrary enforcement of draconian laws and regulations. But I also don't want to see people creating rules or hurdles to overcome that don't exist.
Aaron
