One Point of Failure
Take an honest inventory of where your family's wealth actually lives. For most families reading this, the answer is one place. One business that everything depends on. One plot of land that holds...
For those rebuilding financial life and legacy alone.
Articles and guides curated for widows and widowers on building a lasting family legacy.
Browse all LegacyPot Journal articles
Take an honest inventory of where your family's wealth actually lives. For most families reading this, the answer is one place. One business that everything depends on. One plot of land that holds...
The week after the funeral is when a family discovers what was never written down. A widow sits at the table her husband managed everything from, holding a phone full of mobile money confirmations...
There is a financial examination almost nobody rehearses for, and it arrives on the worst day of your life. A wife buries her husband, or a husband his wife, and within weeks, sometimes days, the...
Joe Robbie did what the advice columns tell every responsible person to do. He made a plan. Before his death in 1990, the one-time owner of the Miami Dolphins football team and the stadium the team...
James Hughes spent decades as an American trusts and estates lawyer to some of the wealthiest families in the world, and out of all those years he kept returning to one observation that should not be...
The story begins the way thousands of family businesses begin. A couple starts a company in the family home. She is the first employee, the cheerleader, the one with faith in the venture; he keeps...
Two consultants who spent their careers inside family businesses once admitted, in print, to a fantasy about their clients. They had "often thought," they wrote, "about trying to find an ethical way...
A seventy-five-year-old widower owns eight jewelry stores doing about twelve million dollars a year in sales. His two sons work in the business and argue constantly, in the office, in front of the...
A few years before she wrote her book, a financial adviser flew to Bermuda for a close friend's wedding and stretched the trip into a full eight-day vacation with her husband. It was, by her own...
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...
The sentence usually arrives within weeks of the burial, and it usually arrives from a relative. Sometimes it is said gently, over tea: "You know, this house was never really yours." Sometimes it is...
There is a particular kind of peace that settles on a person who has signed a will. The lawyer prepared it, witnesses watched the pen move, and the document went home to a file cabinet or a drawer....
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...
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...
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...