Around Christmas each year, I mention in my podcast that it’s a perfect time to ask family members over the age of 18 whether they’ve considered creating an estate plan. I mention 18 because, in most states, once a child becomes a legal adult, parents can no longer automatically make medical or financial decisions for them.
While I mention 18-year-olds here, this post is really about adults with any adult children who often have children of their own.
Our culture does not encourage conversations about money, inheritance, illness, incapacity or death. We avoid talking about who receives what, who can speak to doctors, who makes medical or financial decisions if someone can’t, who gets Dad’s tools or guns or who receives Mom’s jewelry.
More than once I’ve met with adult children who believed their parents had planned ahead financially, only to discover after a death that there was little or nothing available to cover final expenses. What the parents actually had was a $1,000 life insurance policy they received years earlier when they opened a bank account.
One of my first clients was a couple in this situation. His Dad kept saying everything was taken care of. Then Dad passed, and all that was available was $1,000. The son and siblings paid over $10,000 of their own funds. He vowed he wasn’t going to do that to his children.
Detailed conversations about estate planning can prevent this. I know it can be difficult. When I do my own estate planning, it sometimes seemed overwhelming … and I’m an estate planning attorney. So I truly appreciate that these conversations can be difficult. They require vulnerability. They may expose financial realities – abundance or limitations. They may involve discussing declining health, fears about incapacity, or end-of-life wishes that differ from what family members would hope for. They may involve conversations about end of life, from doing all that’s possible to doing nothing at all.
The conversations are necessary. They are rarely easy. They are easy to postpone. AND they are one of the greatest gifts families can give to one another.