Long before most of us had a financial plan, we were already learning about money. Maybe you watched your parents save carefully for something your family wanted. Maybe money was talked about openly at home, or hardly discussed at all. You may remember times when money felt tight, or you may have grown up believing that having plenty of cash in the bank was an important source of security.
Those experiences have a way of staying with us. Whether we realize it or not, the financial decisions we make today may be shaping someone else’s ideas about money, too. Children and grandchildren see how we save, spend, give, and respond when financial circumstances change. As they grow older, they may also begin to wonder why we made the choices we did.
Financial planning is about preparing for our own future, and creates an opportunity to consider what we want the people we love to understand about the financial life we’ve built.
Where did your ideas about money begin?
We see the influence of early experiences in financial planning conversations all the time. Two people can look at the same financial picture and feel very differently about it. One spouse may be comfortable keeping relatively little cash in the bank, while the other feels better with a larger reserve. One person may be comfortable investing through periods of uncertainty, while another feels a strong urge to pull back.
Sometimes those preferences are rooted in experiences from much earlier in life. Understanding where they come from doesn’t mean deciding whether they’re right or wrong. It simply gives us more context for helping you make financial decisions that fit your life today.
What financial lessons do you want to pass on?
Over time, financial decisions can reflect the work you did, the tradeoffs you made, the people you cared for, and the opportunities you hoped to create. For many of our clients, the financial picture changed as their families grew and moved through different stages of life. Children became adults. Grandchildren arrived. A financial life that may have once centered on building a career, raising a family, and preparing for retirement began to include something else: What do we want carried forward?
Assets may be part of the answer. So can the perspective that helped you build and manage those assets. If someone you love were trying to understand your financial life someday, what would you want them to know? Why did you make certain decisions? What did the experience teach you about having enough, taking a risk, helping someone you love, or using your wealth in a meaningful way?
Those lessons may be just as valuable to share with loved ones as the financial details themselves.
Estate planning can help shape understanding
Your estate planning documents play an essential role in putting your wishes into effect. Beneficiary designations, wills, trusts, powers of attorney, and other planning decisions can help establish what should happen and who should be involved.
Documents alone may not tell your family why you made those decisions or what you hope they’ll understand about them. That’s part of the reasoning behind FORM’s Legacy Plan™.
Legacy planning gives you an opportunity to capture experiences, values, wishes, and life lessons alongside the financial information your family may someday need. It can also help you decide what conversations you’d like to have now, who you’d like to involve, and what you want those people to understand.
Those conversations don’t need to begin with your entire financial picture. Talking with adult children about your finances and estate plan can start with the information you’re comfortable sharing and grow over time. They might start with one decision your family has already seen you make and discuss why you made it and what you learned from it.
What will they remember?
None of us can know exactly which lessons the next generation will carry with them, but we can be more intentional about sharing them. Your financial life contains years of experience that can’t be captured on a balance sheet; decisions that worked, decisions you might make differently today, values that guided you, and perspective that took decades to develop.
A thoughtful legacy can include the wealth you’ve built. It can also include helping the people you love understand the life and the lessons behind it.
