Elders — LegacyPot Journal

Articles and guides

Willing or Able

Somewhere today, an advisor is asking a client the financial industry's favorite question: what is your risk tolerance? The client will think for a moment, consult their stomach, and produce an...
An Unsecured IOU in a Nice Envelope

In September 2008, thousands of careful, safety-minded investors discovered what they actually owned. They had bought products called structured notes, sold to them by brokers as a nearly magical...
Collect for Love, Not for Money

In almost every family home we know, there is a shelf, a cupboard, or a corner of a field that holds the beautiful things. The gold jewelry that came with a marriage and has been added to at every...
Right and Early Is Wrong

In 1998, the smartest room in finance blew up. Long-Term Capital Management was a hedge fund run by John Meriwether, one of the most celebrated bond traders alive, alongside Myron Scholes and Robert...
The Cube of Gold

Warren Buffett once put a choice to two financial writers over a conversation they would go on to publish. On one side of the choice: all the gold in the world. Every ring, every bar, every coin ever...
The Curse of Plenty

There is a country on Africa's west coast that, by one measure, is among the richest places on earth. Oil made it so. And there is a second fact about the same country that should not be able to...
What Custom Cannot Take

In a Machakos courtroom in the 1990s, a married daughter came to claim a share of her late father's estate. Her father, a Kamba man, had died in 1988. The judge ruled against her, and the reasoning...
The Name on the Account

The phone call happens in every diaspora family eventually, and it sounds like love, because it is. A mother in Kampala or Accra or Kingston is getting older, and the banking is getting harder: the...
What the Questionnaire Reveals

Before a single strategy is discussed, before any fee is paid, before you have said one word about your land or your children, an estate lawyer will usually hand you a piece of paper. In the United...
The House That Waits for Two Deaths

Elizabeth almost did not remarry. She was 55, widowed, with grown children and an estate worth 6.5 million American dollars, most of it left to her by her late first husband: a valuable home, and...
The Land That Outlived the Family

William and Emma Banks bought land the way many of our grandparents bought land: early, cheaply, and long before anyone else could see what it would become. Their 3.4 acres sat on the beachfront in...
The Letter Nobody Could Find

Nancy was the oldest of three sisters, and like many oldest daughters, she was the one who handled things. Her parents lived in New York; she lived across the American continent in California, and...
The Coffee Estate That Took Sixty-Six Years

In 1936, in the princely state of Mysore in southern India, a man named Lachiah Setty died. He was the head of one of the wealthiest families in the state, with coffee estates, securities, and...
The Son Who Could Not Inherit

There is a myth most families carry about inheritance disputes, and it is a comfortable one: that the worst an unsettled estate can produce is unpleasantness. Cold greetings at funerals. A brother...
The Will That Arrived Too Fast

A mother in India, whom the court record calls P, had three daughters. When she died, a will appeared, and the will did something wills are perfectly entitled to do: it made one daughter, I, the sole...
The Family Favorites Book

Buried in the special-activities chapter of a 2002 church manual, between a mother-daughter makeover idea and a note about adoptive-family support groups, sits a single sentence that contains an...
Every Decision Is a Generational Decision

A father is offered a new job. It pays better than the last one, and it will keep him traveling, away from home more. Flip the scenario: another offer pays less but returns him to his family's dinner...
What You're Actually Paid For

Two plots of land sit side by side on the edge of town, same size, same red soil, same distance from the tarmac. One is priced at a number that makes you wince. The other, its neighbor, is listed at...
Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Halfway up an unnamed slope in the port city of Hakodate, in northern Japan, there is a small cafe with a view of the harbor and an urban legend attached to one of its chairs. Sit in that chair, the...