From the Editor: Just Begin

While not as dramatic as surviving on Mars, I see some benefit to approaching wealth planning with a similar philosophy. Creating a plan to achieve your goals involves finding solutions to problems and answering questions. There is a sense of accomplishment as you find solutions and progress toward your goals, and this can help relieve some of the anxiety we feel about the future.

But not all problems have simple and straightforward answers, and the path to achieving your goals is not easily laid out. There might not even be a right answer in the traditional sense of the word. This can particularly be the case when considering estate planning and deciding how to pass on your wealth.

Let’s look at a popular issue, what to do with the family cottage when you have multiple children. I’ve read many professional opinions that say something like, sell the cottage and just give the money to your children. There’s logic behind this, cottages can be expensive to maintain, and you could be concerned about passing that burden on to your children. At some point, your ‘children’ also become adults with families of their own, and multiple families owning one property can lead to conflict. So, simply avoiding those issues altogether has an appealing simplicity to it. But there can be emotional and sentimental attachments to a cottage, all the memories connected to that place. When you start adding those into the mix, selling that property may not be as easy an answer as it might seem.

I have also seen people’s struggles when considering their own needs and wealth against a desire to help their children. Parents can worry that giving too much too soon to their children might negatively impact how their children live. However, they also don’t want to see their children struggle when they are in a position to help. Or else they have to weigh their own needs against their children’s as they don’t want to give away too much of their wealth in case they themselves will need it in the future.

So, what are the answers to these situations? That ultimately is the point; there isn’t one right answer. And because the way forward doesn’t seem clear or direct, people often delay addressing these issues. But the concerns and anxieties that come from not having a plan to address their problems aren’t going away. In fact, those feelings will likely only get worse. This is why you just have to begin, even in the face of no simple answers. Planning often starts this way, and no plan will be perfect or even final, and the process will feel messy and uncertain at times. But if your approach is to start somewhere with an individual issue rather than worrying about solving everything at once, you’ll increase your chances of moving closer to your goals. This is where the Wealth Planners at Nexus can help, by guiding you through the process and moving you towards getting started.

To delve deeper into what the process looks like to tackle some of these larger planning goals please read Dianne White’s latest article, “The Top 10 Considerations When Helping Your Adult Children Buy Real Estate.”