For the generation holding memory, land, and the family name.
Articles and guides curated for elders on building a lasting family legacy.
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The handover is done, or nearly done. The successor signs, the council meets, the accounts have new names on them. And now comes a question the corpus has circled from several directions without ever answering head on: what exactly is your seat at the table you built? Not the...
You wrote the will. You signed the powers of attorney. You did the hard thing, probably years ago, and you have earned the feeling of a job finished. Here is the uncomfortable truth this article exists to deliver: a will written at 45 is often a bad will by 70. Not because the...
The corpus has a name for the way family wealth quietly disappears: the sugar-bowl problem. Money hidden in the sugar bowl, the mattress, the account nobody knew about, the plot bought quietly in 2009. As [One Page Per Asset](/blog/one-page-per-asset) documents, the asset does...
There is a version of giving that most elders run by default: hold everything until the end, then let the paperwork distribute it. The corpus has a name for what that produces. As [Warm-Hand Giving](/blog/warm-hand-giving-window) puts it, quoting Bill Perkins, it is giving...
There are two ways the family land gets divided. In the first, you divide it: while you are strong, with a surveyor's map on the table, your children around it, and every question answered by the one person who can answer it. In the second, a court divides it, years after your...
There is a stage of succession that plans cannot reach. You have named the successor. You have talked about the handover for years, perhaps run the phased sequence in [The Handover Decade](/blog/elders-handover-decade). And yet the business still runs through you: suppliers call ...
You probably assume your financial influence on your grandchildren runs through your children. You raised them, they are raising theirs, and whatever you taught will trickle down or it will not. It is a comfortable assumption, because it means your teaching work is finished. The ...
Picture a hospital corridor at eleven at night. Three of your children are standing in it. One says you would want everything done, whatever it costs. One says you always said you never wanted to end up on machines. One is on the phone to a sibling abroad who is angry about...
There is a version of aging that every family pretends will not happen, and because they pretend, it arrives unplanned: the hands that shake too much to sign, the memory that loses a PIN, the morning when a bank teller looks at you with a new kind of patience. Most elders meet...
The corpus tells everyone to write an ethical will this weekend, in the middle of an ordinary, unfinished life. [Write Your Ethical Will](/blog/write-your-ethical-will) is right, and if you never have, start there with the five-part template and one hour. But the letter written...
Billy Graham's warning, carried into this corpus by [Check Direction on Your Birthday](/blog/direction-not-distance), is seven words long: "Starting strong is common. Finishing strong is rare." His example is King Saul, who began anointed, humble, and full of promise, and ended...
This is the last article in the elders' track, and the last in the persona layer it closes. Fifteen articles ago, [The Handover Decade](/blog/elders-handover-decade) asked you to treat the transfer of everything you hold as a ten-year project. Every article since has been a...
Every culture that has watched money move through families has coined the same proverb, and the fact that they all agree should frighten us more than it does. The Americans say shirtsleeves to...
Near the end of a book that has spent two hundred pages on stocks, side hustles, rental units, and wills, Kendalynn Mowery stops, almost mid-stride, and files a correction against her own project....
In 2008, families who had never owned a share of stock in their lives watched the value of their work shrink anyway. A shop in Kampala that sold building materials saw orders stop because a bank in...
"You might feel that sometimes the bank doesn't trust you," write Simon Constable and Robert E. Wright in The WSJ Guide to the 50 Economic Indicators That Really Matter (Harper Business, 2011)....
Picture a grown son on the day his father's will is read. For years he has quietly assumed an inheritance of about $500,000. Nothing was ever promised out loud; nothing needed to be. The family...
At the age when most professionals in his country were being handed a farewell cake and a card signed by the office, Ron Blue did something that sounds almost like a boast until you hear how he meant...
Somewhere in America, at a family reunion, more than 120 people from four generations gathered in one place. Among them were 60 great-grandchildren of a single man. One of them, a young woman of 21,...
Every parent with more than one child eventually meets the arithmetic of fairness, and most meet it first in small change. Ron Blue meets it, in his book Faith-Based Family Finances, over $300. He...
Picture the annual meeting of a successful family business. The relatives arrive, some from far away. The chief executive, who may be a brother, a father, or a hired professional, stands up and...
There is a moment in the life of every large family when someone looks around a gathering and quietly grieves. The cousins no longer all know each other's children. Two branches have not spoken since...
It began with a hat. A handful of cousins, members of the sixth generation of an American family whose fortune was more than a century old, sat in one of their family meetings and decided to do...
In 1824, a Quaker named John Cadbury opened a grocery store in Birmingham, England, and by 1831 he had a factory making drinking chocolate, which he believed was a healthy alternative to alcohol. So...