The best time to give your money away is while you are still here to watch what it does.
The best time to give your money away is while you are still here to watch what it does.
The line comes from Ron Blue's Splitting Heirs, and he made it memorable on purpose: "Do your givin' while you're livin' so you're knowin' where it's goin'." Blue spent a career advising families on transfers, and his conclusion was that the timing of a gift matters almost as much as its size. A lifetime gift is an act you participate in. A bequest is an act you are absent from.
Why it works comes down to what a living giver can do that an estate cannot. When you give now, you can explain the gift, attach a purpose to it, watch how it is handled, and adjust the next one. You get the joy of seeing a daughter open her clinic or a nephew finish school, and they get you, present, as part of the story. A gift left behind arrives as a lump with no teacher attached. The research corpus keeps finding the same thing from the other direction: when transfers fail, the cause is almost never bad legal work, it is unprepared heirs and conversations that never happened. Lifetime giving is the conversation, funded. It also lands when your children can actually use it, in the years of school fees, first homes, and first businesses, rather than decades later when their own habits and balance sheets are already set.
The habit is a scheduled lifetime giving review, once a year:
LegacyPot builds the rhythm into your Pots. A dedicated lifetime giving Pot fills through the year, and when your review date comes round the app puts the principle in front of you plainly: a gift given now teaches, blesses, and can be guided. The same gift left behind is a surprise. Consider giving one thing early. The yearly nudge means the question never depends on your memory, and the Pot means the money is already set aside when the answer is yes.
This week, write down one gift currently sitting in your will and name the date this year when you will hand it over yourself.