Wealth Litigated · 2026-06-01 · 16 min
A husband moved $350,000 in marital stock options into a Nevada irrevocable trust - telling his wife it was tax planning. Four years later, he filed for divorce in Utah. Could the divorce court reach those options, or had the irrevocable trust put them beyond equitable distribution for good? In this Wealth Litigated Brief-ly (Episode B102), we forensically analyze the Utah Court of Appeals decision in Hillam, a 2024 divorce appeal where the same transfer into an irrevocable trust was argued two ways at once: legitimate tax planning, and dissipation of marital assets. The trial court granted summary judgment to the Investment Trustee, ruling the irrevocable trust - with its spendthrift provision - was a separate, non-marital entity that owned the stock options. On appeal, the wife's arguments to reach the assets inside the trust hit a procedural wall: issues raised for the first time on appeal, after the governing statute was excluded at trial, were unpreserved - and barred from review on the merits. That left one path: dissipation, framed as a credit against the marital estate, not a claim against the trust.
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