You intend to pass along your wealth through your estate plan, but what about your wisdom? Ensuring you accomplish both calls for a family meeting to have a conversation about your money, your legacy, and your core principles.
Most families lead far-flung and busy lives, meaning the only time they see one another face-to-face is around the dinner table during a handful of major holidays. The estate planning process is a perfect opportunity to bring everyone together outside of those scheduled occasions — even if a child or grandchild has to attend via video chat.
Working with your estate planning attorney in collaboration any other advisors you have in your corner can make this legacy-enriching process seamless and genuinely enjoyable. But bringing your family and your professional advisors into the conversation is better yet, as they’ll get to learn new things about you and get to share stories and memories of their own. Here are just a few of the topics you’ll want to go over during your family meeting:
1. Your rich life story
You may think it’s all been said before, but this is the perfect time to schedule or conduct recording sessions about your own personal life narrative. These recordings will be treasured while you’re still here and long after you’re gone. Allow your family members to ask about particularly fond memories of yours, knowing that you’re creating a time capsule of sorts that will contain the uniqueness of your personality and the experiences that shaped you into the person you are today. And perhaps most importantly, share the valuable lessons you’ve learned from your experiences. Your family will be better for it.
2. How you’d like to be honored
Estate planning involves considering some weighty decisions when it comes to long-term care, powers of attorney, and other situations that may arise should you become mentally incapacitated. Although these are not the sunniest of topics, it’s important to express to your family why you’re opting for the choices you feel most aligned with. This will ease those processes for your loved ones, should these things ever come to pass. And once you get this part of the conversation covered, there are better things to come.
3. Your family tree
Your family might be curious about more than just your own life story. Take this time to go over your family tree and answer questions the younger members of your family don’t know the answers to about your heritage. Getting a who’s who on paper and in a digital format is an excellent gift to your beneficiaries, as they’ll be able to reference it and build upon it throughout the years.
4. Significant heirlooms
Every family has heirlooms, and every piece tells a story. It’s common for estate plans to contain physical objects that matter dearly to their owners, such as furniture, garments, jewelry, hobby collections, and memorabilia. Keeping the story of the object alive is more important than transferring its monetary value to the next generation.
5. Your core values
Your estate plan can be customized to include specific language that carries your values along with it while still leaving room for your beneficiaries to grow and explore on their own terms. Educational, incentive, and charitable trusts are just a few methods available to you to express your values through your estate plan.
You know there’s much more to you than the wealth you’ve accumulated in your life. Likewise, your estate plan is about more than just your financial worth. After all, what’s passed down from generation to generation amounts to something far greater than numbers on paper.
We’d love to help you build your estate plan to include a balanced representation of who you are and what you believe. We’re here to help coach you through the process of going over these topics with your family and weaving them into your trusts and other critical documents. Give us a call today to set up a time, and we’ll get started right away.
