Archive for ‘legacy planning’

“I don’t feel like I’m dying,” she tells me.  “I’m at peace with this.”

June is 81, and the doctors tell her she has pancreatic cancer.  She was diagnosed something over a year ago and the cancer cells have moved from her pancreas to her arteries to her lungs.  She has a pretty aggressive chemo treatment – 6 hours in the hospital, every other week for six months.  This new regimen is the fifth such treatment in her battle.

And it is a battle.  Her feet hurt, her arms tire, her back aches.  Fatigue is a constant problem for her, the hardest symptom for a woman used to keeping up with women half her age or younger.  But June hasn’t given in yet, or given up.

She’s sitting at her kitchen table with her husband of 61 years, Al.  It’s a good Saturday morning.  No pain, no fatigue yet.   The remains of breakfast (blueberry and banana nut muffins) sit in pans on the table.  A half-full blue ceramic coffee mug sits next to her Bible.

“‘Do not worry about your life’,” she quotes to me.  “‘Or about what you will eat or drink, or about your body’.  That’s my favorite verse now.  I’m still worry-free and depression-free.”

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One of the questions we ask people when we are talking about heritage or legacy planning is, “How much money does it take to harm a child?”

The answer, invariably, is “not much” or something along those lines.

Economics blog Marginal Revolution pointed me to this working paper from Vanderbilt University, who did a study on bankruptcy rates of lottery winners.  The study focuses on comparing those who won between $50,000 and $150,000 versus those who won smaller amounts.  The primary finding of the study is that people who are awarded large amounts are just as likely to eventually have financial difficulty (bankruptcy, in the extreme) as those who win smaller amounts.  All the larger amount does is delay the financial reckoning.  This shows, as MR notes, that bankruptcy isn’t really about money at all. More »

The best way to introduce the concept of heritage planning is to ask you to do a simple mental exercise.

If you could look 50 years into the future and witness a gathering of your entire family, what would you like to see going on?  What kinds of conversations would you like to hear?  What would you want your family to feel?

Now think about the financial and estate planning you have done to date and ask yourself this question:

How far will that planning get me towards the picture of my family that I’ve just envisioned?

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