## Facts

- Charles Long was the beneficiary of an irrevocable trust created by his parents and funded with oil- and gas-producing property for the benefit of their children.
- The trust provided for distribution of one-half of Charles’s share of the corpus when he turned 25 and the remaining half when he turned 30.
- Charles married Kathy Long; the spouses later separated.
- Charles turned 25 after the separation but before either spouse filed for divorce, making him eligible to receive about $85,000 (one-half of his share of the trust corpus).
- Charles chose not to take the distribution and left the assets in the trust, with management continuing under the trust arrangement.
- From Charles’s 25th birthday to the end of the marriage, the trust assets attributable to Charles’s share generated $4,973.21 in income, including interest, dividends, and proceeds described as equipment rental and cattle sales.
- In the divorce judgment, the trial court awarded Kathy alimony but awarded her no portion of the trust corpus or the trust income.
- On appeal, Kathy conceded the trust corpus was Charles’s separate property but argued the trust income earned during the marriage was community property subject to division.

## Issues

1. Whether income generated during marriage by a spouse’s separate-property interest in a third-party irrevocable trust is community property subject to division when the beneficiary spouse was eligible to receive part of the corpus but left it in trust and the income was not distributed.

## Decision

- Affirmed.
- Held the trust corpus was Charles’s separate property.
- Rejected Kathy’s claim that the $4,973.21 of trust income earned during marriage (but retained in the trust) was divisible community property under these facts.
- Upheld the trial court’s division of property that left the trust corpus and the disputed trust income with Charles.

## Legal Principles

- In Texas, property acquired by gift, devise, or inheritance is separate property, and an irrevocable trust funded by parents for a child may create a separate-property beneficial interest.
- Texas community property law generally treats “rents, revenues, and income” from separate property as community property, but classification depends on whether the spouse (and thus the community estate) has actually acquired the property.
- Undistributed trust income that remains under trust administration, and is not reduced to the possession or control of the marital community, may be treated as part of the beneficiary spouse’s separate trust interest rather than as community property available for division at divorce.
- A beneficiary spouse’s eligibility to receive a distribution does not automatically convert income retained in the trust into community property for divorce division purposes when the assets and income remain within the trust structure rather than being received into the marital estate.

## Conclusion

Long v. Long affirmed a divorce decree that treated an irrevocable parental trust as the husband’s separate property and refused to award the wife any share of trust income that accrued during the marriage but remained undistributed in the trust, even though the husband had become eligible to receive a corpus distribution and chose to leave it in trust.


Long v. Long, 542 S.W.2d 712 (1976)