Okay - so you (and/or your spouse, if applicable - and yes, I know you’re not married) are not the only beneficiary receiving the income.
CRUTs are only exempt from gift taxes when you (and/or your spouse, if applicable) are the only beneficiaries receiving income. If others (like your relatives) are receiving the income, then gift taxes are applicable.
That’s the thing - gift taxes for CRUTs are based on the income stream to the beneficiaries, but given that in prior threads, you had indicated:
Based on the original contributions creating that horse race, and the fact that each year, the CRUT needs to distribute a fixed percentage of assets, not a fixed dollar amount, additional contributions to a CRUT would increase the total assets in the CRUT, pushing the income stream into being subject to gift taxes.
The problem with keeping an income stream based on a percentage of assets below the chained CPI (which is what inflation for taxes is now based on) when the growth rates are significantly higher than inflation means that you probably need to distribute more than the expected growth rate of your portfolio. But then you run into the problem that if you have a string of bad years, at the end of the trust term you need to have at least 10% to distribute to the charity - so over distributing isn’t really an option.
AJ