J_____, our legacy planner, has been stressing, from the very beginning of our relationship, the need for the professionals on our team — our attorney, our CPA, our investment advisor, and J___ himself — to be on the same page when they speak with Sarita and me.

“You want to include all planning team members in the process from the beginning,” he said. “We need to be able to communicate openly one with another without worrying about being embarrassed or having our egos bruised by having you [John, client] hear any of our questions or comments.”

In order to ensure that end, then, he told us that he would meet with all our advisors prior to telling us anything about the details of the plan he is putting together.

Well, the advisors’ final, pre-presentation meeting was scheduled for this morning. And J_____ just wrote me: Read the rest of this entry »

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I don’t know what to think. Our legacy planner, J____, seems pretty excited about whatever-it-is he’s putting together for us. He’s supposed to be one of the nation’s — and, therefore, the world’s — leading legacy planners. So I sure hope he’s not hyping us!

Anyway. He just wrote me:

We have been working feverishly on your Master Stewardship Plan. We have another conference call with L____ and B____ tomorrow morning to review the plan design that we have been developing. I do not expect there will be much in the way of changes from either of them on the draft plan we have been building. We have been keeping them in the loop for the entire process. L____ [our CPA] has be extraordinarily helpful to us. We have not really had S_____ [our investment advisor] involved since most of what we are doing at this point is legal and accounting type planning. I will make sure he has an opportunity to review the proposed Master Stewardship Plan before we present it to you. We can likely send him the draft for his review next week. I cannot imagine he will have any problems with what we are designing. . . .

I will say that I fully expect that you and Sarita are going to be awestruck when you see the plan we are assembling for you. You can hold me to that. I have designed a lot of plans over my career and seen a lot more as well and your plan I think will be one of the most profoundly powerful plans we have ever designed.

Give us just a few more weeks to finish our design work and get the Master Stewardship Plan book and presentation finished and we will be ready to present it to you. I am personally about as excited with your plan as I have been with any plan I have ever designed.

Is that an adequate build up for what is coming?

Stay tuned. We are bearing down on the finish line.

Okay!

I’ve already read Jay Link’s Family Wealth Counseling.

He’s issued a clarion call to pay attention not only to the financial aspects of an estate plan or legacy plan, but, I would say, he calls our attention even more to the social and spiritual/emotional issues related to one’s . . . lifetime legacy.

I chose those last two words carefully.

I think we aren’t normally challenged to think in terms of our lives when it comes to estate planning. We are led to think in terms of death, dying, and what happens after our lives are over.

Link, by contrast, calls us to Read the rest of this entry »

Yipes! it’s been two months since S___ agreed to help us find a replacement legacy planner for G____.

S____ told us today that he has vetted seven planners and decided that none of them matched our needs. When he finally thought he had found one and brought us together with him for a final interview, frankly, all three of us–Sarita, S____, and I–were shocked at how the planner handled the interview. Read the rest of this entry »

I met today with G_____, the guy who is helping us set our family legacy goals. He gave me a preliminary read-out on “where we’re headed” financially. Pretty mind-blowing. I’m having him revise his “assumptions” in a few spots, but no matter how the assumptions go, we are looking at a potentially truly HUGE fortune to deal with before Sarita and I die.

Assuming death dates of 2040 (when we’d both be in our mid-80s) and assuming several other things as G_____ did (for example, low single-digit yields and mid- to higher-single-digit growth in most investments), we are looking at a combined net worth of well over a hundred million dollars at the time of our death. Even if we give away 50% to 70% of our Adjusted Gross Income on an annual basis.

Frankly . . . honestly . . . this seems unbelievable. It is . . . just . . . beyond belief. Beyond imagination. It “can’t” be true.

And, honestly, I am unwilling to go along with some of his assumptions. For example, Read the rest of this entry »