Designing Your Legacy: Time To Shred Your 5 Year Plan

DESIGNING YOUR LEGACY: TIME TO SHRED YOUR 5 YEAR PLAN

If you want to enjoy significant and sustainable family wealth, and a legacy which really makes a difference it may be time to rethink your financial plan.

Having a five year plan was supposed to be a big deal. Of course over the last decade millions of Americans and American companies have gone bankrupt. Unlikely that was in their plan, but it may be partially due to how short term their plans were. Meanwhile other international corporations, and a few leading investors and firms have thrived. The biggest difference with the latter group is their passion for having a 100 year plan.

If you don’t want to only do well for the next five years, but for the next ten, for the next few decades of your children’s lives, and perhaps their children as well you need to think bigger and longer. This applies if you have no plans for kids, and simply want to take care of your pet or to take care of a favorite cause, charity, or community instead.

​How long do you want your legacy to last? How big do you want it to be? Put numbers on those things. Then work backwards to understand the steps that need to be taken to get there.
There are several parts to putting this type of legacy and estate planning into action:

• Selecting investments
• Choosing the right structures and paperwork
• Finding the professionals who will help

Consider which types of investments will help you reach your financial goals over the long term. You may need trust, wills, LLCs, and other entities and documents to best provide on your objectives, and to facilitate your wishes after you are gone. We all also need experts in each of these areas to give us the very best insight, and to ensure our assets and wills are managed and executed on according to our wishes.

While many avoid it, having conversations with your heirs about your estate and legacy plans early and often can be wise. Otherwise how will they know what you want, how to manage it best, and who to get help from? Tell them, show them, and explain why.

If you don’t have these conversations the chances are that you won’t get what you want. The wrong assets will get sold, they will be managed poorly, and the causes you care most about won’t be supported. And without a master plan odds are that you won’t arrive where you want to be on time.

None of us really know what will happen tomorrow, but you can put things into play now, today, which will put your legacy on the right track regardless of whether you are around to manage your finances and investments for another 12 months, 12 years, or 120 years.