For couples whose first child changed everything they planned.
Articles and guides curated for new parents on building a lasting family legacy.
Browse all LegacyPot Journal articles
In the last days of January 1896, in a greenhouse in the village of Sérignan in Provence, the French naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre watched a line of caterpillars climb the side of a large clay vase that held a palm tree.
On 6 March 2007, Safaricom, Kenya's largest mobile operator, launched a service that had started life as a scheme for repaying microfinance loans. During the pilot, something unplanned kept happening. Users mostly...
In 1973, the United States Army adopted a habit that had nothing to do with weapons and everything to do with memory. After every significant training event, the people who had just lived through it would sit down...
One morning in 1968, in a small room at the Bing Nursery School on the Stanford University campus, a researcher sat a four-year-old at a table and put a marshmallow in front of her. The deal was explained slowly,...
In 2009, while most of the financial world was still sweeping up after the crash, Bloomberg Press published a book written not for families but for the professionals who advise them. Family Wealth Transition Planning,...
At about 3:25 on the afternoon of January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 lifted off from LaGuardia Airport in New York with 155 people on board. Roughly two minutes later, climbing through 2,800 feet, the plane flew...
In 2024, the Singapore academic publisher World Scientific released the second edition of a book called Family Wealth Management: Seven Imperatives for Successful Investing. Its authors are two of the most senior...
In 2022, the publisher Wiley released the second edition of a book called Complete Family Wealth. Its lead author, James E. Hughes Jr., is a retired trust and estate attorney whose 1997 book Family Wealth helped found...
In 2010, the academic publisher Praeger released a reference book by a scholar named Ronald L. Eisenberg called What the Rabbis Said: 250 Topics from the Talmud. It is not a devotional book, and it does not argue with...
In the fifth chapter of a book published in 2015 for families wealthy enough to keep their own investment counsel, a money manager named Jean Brunel stops writing about money and starts writing about an aircraft.
In 2010, the academic publisher Praeger released a reference book by Ronald L. Eisenberg called What the Rabbis Said: 250 Topics from the Talmud. It is a patient, scholarly catalogue, roughly 146,000 words long, of what...
In the early 1900s, in the crowded immigrant streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn, a boy named Isidor Isaac Rabi came home from school every afternoon to a question. His family was poor. His parents had arrived from Galicia...
In the tenth chapter of a book about some of the heaviest fortunes in the world, Charles Lowenhaupt tells the story of an architect who had nothing left to want.
Part of Family E, the LegacyPot persona anthologies. Fifteen guides, sequenced. A child arrives with wonder and with a long list of decisions that no one hands you in the ward. Some are urgent and loud, like where the next term's fees will come from. Others are quiet and easy to ...
There is a moment, somewhere in your child's first weeks, when the family gathers. Call it the naming ceremony, the baptism, the introduction to the grandparents, the first visit to the village. Relatives arrive with gifts: baby clothes in three sizes, a blanket, envelopes...
The day your child is born, every piece of paperwork in your life quietly changes rank. The land file, the loan agreement, the business registration: all of it steps back, and a different set of documents steps forward. Most new parents never notice the reshuffle, because the...
Before the baby, life insurance was a conversation you could postpone without lying to anyone. Two working adults, each capable of surviving the loss of the other's income, can defensibly file the question under later. The day your child is born, that filing becomes false....
Ask a room of young parents what could wreck their family financially and they will name the dramatic things: a death, a retrenchment, a business collapse. The corpus's data says something quieter and more likely. The event most likely to reverse a young family's progress is a...
Somewhere between the pregnancy announcement and the first birthday, most families pass through a season when two incomes become one. Sometimes it is maternity months, paid partially or not at all. Sometimes it is a deliberate choice: one parent stays home for a year, or three,...
At the far end of the one-income season sits a question that will quietly move more money than almost any other decision of your child's first five years: who watches the baby while the adults earn. Most families answer it by drift. The auntie is available, so the auntie it is....
The relatives are right about one thing: the second child is cheaper to welcome. The cot exists. The pram exists. The clothes cascade down in labeled bags, and you already own the thermometer you panic-bought at midnight the first time. If you measure by gear, the second baby...
There is a stretch in a young family's life that no budgeting app has a template for: two children under five, one income doing the work of two, childcare eating what the second income used to earn, and a monthly plan that balances only in theory. The corpus has walked you into...
If you followed [the first hundred days](/blog/new-parents-first-documents), your will now carries a guardianship paragraph, and the corpus's [Name a Guardian Today](/blog/name-a-guardian-today) walked you through the choosing: values first, means second, age third. That...
The baby arrives, and so do the grandparents. They come carrying three things, usually in the same bag: love, which you need; opinions, which you did not order; and sometimes money, which arrives with no instructions. Most new parents handle this cargo by mood. On a good day the ...