I’m not sure why you’d want the trust to specify what is done with the house at all. Let the successor trustee and beneficiaries decide the best way to proceed.

Situations change, often drastically, so it is impossible to tell how the beneficiaries lives will be structures decades in advance.

State how much each beneficiary gets, either in terms of dollars or percentages, and let them figure it out.

That’s what we’ve done. As it has turned out, only one of our children has remained in the area so we predict he will take the house as his share along with some cash while the others will likely take all cash as their share. We would prefer our house be used as a primary residence for a family member, so that arrangement would be A-OK with us. But it’s early yet, we’re hoping they don’t have to cross that bridge for decades. 🙂

In any case, pick a successor trustee who will be fair and impartial and everything should turn out fine. My parents picked me. If you don’t have kids that fall into that category pick someone outside of the family tree as the successor trustee. We know families who have done that.

I don’t know how you protect against a new spouse walking in last minute and taking lion’s share. I had worried about that with my Dad as he remarried what I considered to be a golddigger. He caught on and divorced her after a couple of years. When he passed, I went through his papers and found out they had signed a pre-nup. No one had told me about that.