Investment Updates
Understanding The Myths Surrounding Your Estate
Published Wednesday, January 23, 2008 at: 7:00 AM EST
How much have you thought about the legacy you’ll leave behind? Some people lovingly plan their estates, poring over details, involving family members, and making sure everyone knows what to expect. It’s much more common, though, to avoid the subject, tending only to the basics—your will, a little tax planning. If you do that, however, you never really come to grips with questions of not only what you’ll bequeath to whom, but also how you want to be remembered, and what life lessons you’d like to pass along to your loved ones.
With an unprecedented amount of wealth being transferred from the generation that grew up before World War II to post-war baby boomers, many people have misconceptions about the very idea of a legacy. That’s the upshot of a survey sponsored by the financial services company Allianz. In interviews with more than 2,500 people spanning two generations—the baby boomers, and their “elders”—the study uncovered what it terms “the seven myths of the American legacy.”
Today’s inheritances are like any other. It’s really not. The size of the current transfer—some estimates are that $25 trillion may be passed along in coming decades—dwarfs what has come before, and today’s families are more complex, with divorce, remarriage, and geographical dispersion. This clouds what, in simpler times, were more straightforward lines of inheritance. Further complicating things are the sometimes still-rocky relationships between baby boomer children of the 1960s and their parents. And finally, increased longevity means that inheritances may be received by those who are themselves far from young.
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