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Legacy Planning: A Fool's Advice and a Knave's Rebuttal

Legacy Planning Process: Who is a stakeholder? Who is heard? Who is talked about in absentia? Who speaks for whom? Who makes decisions on whose behalf? Who lives with those decisions after the fact?

Stakeholders: Parents, children, grandchildren, generations unborn; nonprofits and society at large; living creatures large and small; those employed by or customers and constituents of family controlled entities (businesses, trusts, foundations, lobbying arms, newspapers, think tanks, social ventures, nonprofits, governmental entities, oval offices, moats, and dungeons); the attorney, CPA, trust officer, insurance professional, financial advisor, family psychologist, philanthropic consultant, fundraiser, religious and moral advisors.

Scope of The Wealthy Family's Vision, Mission, Strategies, Tools, Tactics, Implementation: Personal wealth and personal time and talent; family wealth time and talent; connections, board positions, "pull";  societal needs; the capacities of others to be led, mobilized, activated, or deluded whether within hierarchies, publics, or lattice structures of friends and  friends of friends (movements, cabals, private societies, taste making, trend-setting, heroism).

The Dynastic Dance: In the dance of the elements above who leads and who follows over what range and in what order?

• Who leads as to the vision of a better life for the family, of better family members (more fully developed as ethical, capable and engaged human beings) in a better world for all?
• Who is heard when the wealth is set up for the children? Are they?
• Who speaks for the complexity of the plan, and how all the entities and tools will be managed?
• Who visualizes and scripts the ongoing family chronicle, the story of the family and its origins and ends?
• Who works across the generations, and the silos of expertise, to make the plan, like a Constitution, a living tradition?
• Who governs and manages the ongoing work of the plan, and the entities it controls?

Leverage Points For Social and Family Good

Negative

• Advisors who say, "Whatever you want, Boss, I am here to serve" are necessary, like soldiers whether in the army or the mob, but they are not to control the process of setting the vision, the tone, the spirit, the meaning or the purpose.  They may call themselves "Trusted Advisor" and compare themselves to Richelieu, but they are Toadies all the same, unless they challenge as well as serve the vision.
  
• Parents who make decisions as to vision, goals, end results wanted, without consultation with their own better angel, without consultation with other stakeholders, such as children employees, nonprofits of importance to the family, and fellow citizens.
• Advisors, heirs, and others who seek to win at the other's expense, jockeying for power, wealth, access, and control as in the court of the Medicis.

Mixed

• Clients and advisors who see giving as a tool or technique of tax reduction, and never get around to talking about social purpose and effect.
• Trusted Advisors who thoughtfully elicit but never challenge vision and values. ("Values-neutral values-based planners.")
• Fundraisers and planned giving officers who extract cash and assets for social good without knowledge of, interest in, or concern for, the larger plan of which the giving is a part.
• Moral and religious professional advisors who preach a general sermon, then bow on the church steps and shake the wealthy parishioner's hand, or invite the wealth holder to a private supper to discuss the vestry committee and its works, leaving any particular discussion of the donor's morals aside.

Positive

• Parents who include children and other stakeholders early in the process to help crystalize the vision.
• Advisors who convene rather than control, who listen for vision, not just opportunities for this or that tool or planning technique.
• Advisors who work as a team, keeping one another informed within a sense of common purpose.
• Advisors who have the courage and skill to play devil's advocate, or Socratic questioner, around an emerging vision that is shallow, half considered, or riven with contradictions, family dysfunction, and vanities.
• Nonprofits who have an effect at the vision level, not just around a gift, but around a sense of what it is for the family to live a good, ethical, or noble life, within a good or just society within a thriving natural world.
• Children who do their own planning well, and ask parents if they can be included in the larger family planning sessions at least as to goals. (" But Dad we would rather have a foundation get that money.....")
• Fools who turn the world upside down, if only by aping the advisors with their long faces, long ears, and long tails.

My Own Tutor's Rebuttal

Well, I showed this post to my mentor, the Happy Tutor, Dungeon Master to the Stars, over in Wealth Bondage, America's Most Wonderful Company. I wanted to make sure that this post was not offensive in any way to the higher ups. I don't want Candidia, our mutual boss, to be upset with me. I need a job and I need the money, such as it is.  Teaching philanthropy may be a load of crap, but it sure beats loading body parts into the freezer in the Chill Room.  Tutor's comment was, "Never send a Fool to  do a  Sadist's job, Phil. Send those wealthy sons of bitches over here and I will beat into their bottoms what you fail to drive into their numb skulls." Tutor was drunk at the time, and it is probably unfair to quote him out of context -  a Dumpster full of Garbage where he holds court, naked and unashamed on his own time, after work.

Closing Comment to My Fellow Professionals in Wealth Bondage

We can't save the wealthy from themselves, contrary to what Tutor may think. But we can get rich off them, and escape a beating ourselves, if you follow my advice above. Moderation all things. If you get too idealistic you are setting yourself up to fail. It is not our decision whether the client wants to save the world, rule it, or destroy it. Give the customer what the customer wants, make a ton of money, and give your own opinion, when it is less risky to do so. Now, back to work, there is a fresh load of body parts down on the loading dock.  Get it cleaned up fast. The motorcade from DC is arrives in 30 minutes. We got a Dynasty to plan here folks.

The Legacy Planning Table - Who Has a Seat?

The Legacy Planning Table

At the planning table when the parents draw up the documents with advisors, who has a seat?

1. Mother and Father
2. Tax Attorney
3. CPA
4. Financial Advisor
5. Trust Officer
6. Insurance Professional
7. Business Valuation Expert
8. Philanthropic Consultant
9. Fundraiser/Planned Giving Officer
10. Family psychologist or family facilitator

1 and 2 certainly. Most likely 3 and 4.  Possibly 5. Very likely 6.  Sometimes 7 . Rarely 8.  Almost never 9. Seldom 10, though it may be a good addition.

How about the children, the grown heirs? Seldom or never, yet what a difference for the better it could make to include them before the plans are drawn. Children who are included will not "misread" the final documents as a critique of them. ("Daddy rules me from the grave through my trust officer because Daddy never loved me, never trusted me, and hated my boyfriend. He called my boyfriend a 'predator.' Why did Daddy do this to me? How did I deserve this? No one will ever love me for myself, only for my money. My peers just want to get a loan. No one can understand why I never had a job. Why should I work? My trust gives me more than I could ever make. I have done nothing all my life. I am a failure!") For jolting insights into the Boomer experience with inheritance, see the books documenting many heirs' experiences at The Inheritance Project)

Case Study

Imagine that a family has $10 million. Imagine that if both parents die tonight that the scorecard is like this:

Plan A - Current

$7  million to children
$ 3  to the IRS
$ 0 to charity

Now imagine that with a little work it could look like this, a tax efficient plan.

Plan B

$ 9 million to the children
$ 1 million to IRS
$ 0 to charity

Now imagine that it could also look like this.

Plan C

$ 0 to IRS
$ 10 million to children: Some outright, some in trust, and some in a foundation they can manage.

Who is to say which of these plans, or many more, is "best"? Who is to say which is best for the children, and then the grandchildren down the line? Can parents makes these difficult decisions wisely without giving the grown children a seat at the planning table?

The Rising Generation

I am encouraged by what I see of Gen Y heirs. They have a healthier attitude about inherited wealth than did the Boomers who have filled shelves with books like "The Dark Side of Wealth," about the psychodrama of secrecy and family intrigue around inheritances and its lasting and devastating effect. The new generation is, I hear from its members, politely but persistently asking for their seat at the table when the planning that will impact their lives and their own children's lives is done.

Tip for Future Heirs

What follows is a "best practice" gleaned from an heir who shall remain nameless. She is very bright, a grad student at a top university, and "out" about her money. She is active in giving circles and in peer circles with other Gen Y philanthropically active heirs. Here is what she did:  She had her own financial, estate, and legacy plan drawn up to deploy her own now paltry assets. She took that plan to her wealthy parents and said, "Well, here is my plan. May I see yours?"

Tip for Parents

Why not suggest your children do a financial, estate, and legacy plan for themselves. See how they do. Assist them only if they ask. Let them muddle through. Suggest they have you look at it and offer an opinion. Then, perhaps, you will be willing to share your plan. If you think about it, your child's plan will not change your life, but your plan will certainly change his or hers. As you reflect on the planning scenarios open to you, would your heir's input not be relevant? You can ignore his or her expressed wishes, and perhaps in some cases you should, but those wishes are relevant, and may outlive you, whether in joy or bitterness.  You get the last word in the legal documents. The kids get the last word interpreting your life is family stories. Your legacy is more than money. Let it be more than ashes. Let it be wisdom, courage, and joy.  Let how you do your plan, the virtues your planning process embodies, be the tradition that lives on in memory, imitated by your heirs and on down the line. 

What Counts as Winning in Legacy Planning?

Lower taxes, transmission of family values, creation of autonomous adults, passing of business interests, the family's multi-generational impact on society? What counts as winning for you as parents, or as heirs, and how will you work towards the shared win that will unite the family, and help it stand for what you as a family know is right? A wise planning process maybe starts with open conversation among the stakeholders. If that is difficult, you can be sure that the reading of your will is going to be a tumultuous day. Why not face forward into the difficulties and resolve them as best you can while you are alive, before the attorney stands up in his dark suit, soon after your funeral, to read the legal language that will strike a chill in the hearts of those you love? There should be "nothing new" in the documents read at your death. The plan was made together; you pass the  baton;  and the  race  goes  forward, generation by generation in love, joy, and forgiveness.

Razoo Travel Prize for a Good Act

Join Razoo. Do a good deed from those listed, or set up your own "good act." Winners get travel prizes.  What do others think of such promotions? Are we trivializing giving? Is this the kind of incentive that matters to givers? Will micro-good-deeds add up to something?

Looking at Razoo and at Change.org what seems to be missing is something like what Rousseau would have called the creation of a public will. That is, we have a bourgeois model of tiny consumer choices and micro deeds that are somehow supposed to aggregate into something worthwhile; "the market" will somehow produce big results from little acts. The power of many, the wisdom of crowds will bring good results from trivial, isolated, individualistic, gestures aggregated.

I tend to think we need to see giving/democracy/civil society as more the creation of shared understandings through conversation. Then, when we begin to see things in a certain way, and begin to see one another as allies and friends, and when we begin to use words like solidarity and common purpose, our will, our funds, our lives and our deeds can be "aggregated" in acts that form what amounts to a movement within a shared mythos or set of ideals, or common narrative.  Short of that we are entertaining ourselves and putzing about. 

My perspective is that of a Boomer, yes. And I am truly interested in what Gen X or Y folk have to say, from their generational wisdom and understandings. The next big movement, the thing that might just pull us all back from the brink of extinction, will not come from folks my age, but from the people who are now finding themselves and one another online.  They are not "bowling alone," they are online, collaborating, outside the view of their near-sighted elders who rue the declining membership in the Elks and Kiwanis Clubs, or Jewish Federation, or Rotary, or the established political parties.  Rather than criticizing the rising generations, I hope simply to remain involved as a nearly obsolete elder, learning what he can before the lights go out. (My thoughts on Gen X and Y are indebted to Sharna Goldseker. I interviewed her by phone yesterday. More on that in another post.)

The Feast of Fools: Jesus Circumcised

The Catholic Encyclopedia on The Feast of Fools:

The central idea seems always to have been that of the old Saturnalia, i.e. a brief social revolution, in which power, dignity or impunity is conferred for a few hours upon those ordinarily in a subordinate position. Whether it took the form of the  boy bishop or the subdeacon conducting the cathedral office, the parody must always have trembled on the brink of burlesque, if not of the profane. We can trace the same idea at St. Gall in the tenth century, where a student, on the thirteenth of December each year, enacted the part of the abbot. It will be sufficient here to notice that the continuance of the celebration of the Feast of Fools was finally forbidden under the very severest penalties by the Council of Basle in 1435, and that this condemnation was supported by a strongly-worded document issued by the theological faculty of the University of Paris in 1444, as well as by numerous decrees of various provincial councils. In this way it seems that the abuse had practically disappeared before the time of the Council of Trent.

The Feast of Fools took place, it seems, on the date of Jesus's circumcision, providing, I am sure, much material for pantomime, tomfoolery, and obscene mirth. Apparently, the Lord of Misrule entered the Church  to invert the social order, letting the worst possible taste reign. Erotic frenzy and overt violence, replaced for one day the disguised violence and covert pleasures of solemn hierarchy. What have we gained and what have we lost,  in making our religion so humorless, so life denying and so responsive, or even subordinate, to the worldly powers that be? 

Satire, I think,  the most moral and obscene of the literary arts, is rooted in the saturnalian or Dionysian spirit, one that makes its own moral points about humanity, equality, justice, dirt, and fecundity.   "Come let us drink!" as Rabelais said, raising high the chalice in blasphemous parody of all that is holy.  "Come, let us celebrate the Circumcision of our Lord," says he making slicing off a wafer from the long loaf of  sacred bread. "Come let us eat!," says, he as the whore kneels before him dressed as Nun. Jonathan Swift is perhaps in the same company. On Saturday he throws excrement in a madhouse among the politicians chained to the walls. On Sunday he preaches a plain sensible sermon. How better to help us appreciate that we are all, the mighty and the commoner,  just so much clay or dust? When you hold yourself out as a morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, the highest art would be as a Lord of Misrule. If only I  could rise to that, rather than paltering about as a pennyante moralist in the dour spirit of Bill Bennett.

Where does philanthropy fit? Surely, some generous soul will fund a Feast of Fools? We could stage it at Hudson Institute with Lord Black as the Lord of Misrule, with a Lapsed Priest, a Trusted Advisor, an Attorney, a Trained Monkey, a Fundraiser, a Philanthropic Consultant, and a troupe of Think Tank Thinkers, dancing about on Lord Black's leash while Old Nick (or a retainer costumed as him) plays the bagpipes. We might as well learn to laugh, else who knows where it would end, short of jail or a Dungeon for one and all. I am no better. When the rich man calls me Whore,  I answer, "How may I serve you, Sir?"   As long as your money is good, your morals are fine with me.

We are just playing here, appearances to the contrary. Serio ludere. Mingling delight with instruction, secreting  medicine in candy, as Horace said we poets must if are are to inculcate morals in the higher ups, as the nursemaid does with a child. "So kiss my boots," as my Mistress Candidia said to the Pope, banqueting  in his private quarters, on peacocks' tongue. "Kiss my ring," laughed he, raising his jocund glass, as the mitre tipped from his head into the suet pudding.  We all know that money rules and religion follows with philanthropy and politics on all fours. "Let us drink to the Market!" And we all raise our glass, the golden chains dangling from our wrists.  Who will stand against it? (Jesus, you died in vain.)

Red and Blue End Game

To our Red/Blue dissension is secession the answer? VT could become a Canadian Province. Texas could invade Mexico.  The possibilities are intriquing. 

Is Tom Cruise building '£5m bunker to protect against alien attack'?

This London:

According to American magazine Star, a source said: "Tom is planning to build a US$10 million bunker under his Telluride estate."

Xenu will come again. The Rapture awaits. Many of us seem to have a pretty clear intuition that the current mess is unsustainable. We just mythologize catastrophe in our own way. My own myth is the Dumpster.  They shut the lid and into the heap we go.  Meanwhile we can stockpile empty bottles, twine, and bits of aluminum foil.

Post-Mortem America and the Hard Way Ahead

 Criminal means once tolerated are soon preferred, Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France

Chris Floyd on how democracy died in America while we were discussing giving, or the Super Bowl, or whatever it was that preoccupied us as consumers and citizens over these years since 9/11. The hard way ahead will have few philanthropists, I am afraid, but many givers. Those who create a new currency of conversation and show us how to live in truth without paying a high price for it will be the most valuable.  I have no idea what I am talking about and would suggest that you have no idea either.  By way of bibliography you might find these helpful.

• The Parable of the Sower, by St. Mark
• Robert Frost, Directive
• Andrew Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes
• Bakhtin on dialogism, heteroglossia, and carnival
• Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing
• James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance
• H. Peter Karoff, Sleepwalkers
• Inspector Lohman, Rebuilding Invisible Comic Community
• Tomasz Rozycki, translated by Kombinat!, The Castle
• Catherine Austin Fitts, Tapeworm Economics
• The Happy Tutor, Why Laundering Drug Money Through Philanthropy is Good for America

To this list I might append the life and works of Paul deMan.  My fellow citizens, we are all collaborators now. In the spirit of the liberal arts, the arts of liberty, let us collaborate for the world we want.   

Does Diversity undercut Solidarity and Community?

Jonas, Michael "The Downside of Diversity." Boston Globe 8/05/07. Via Foundation Center Online

Although it has become commonplace to speak of racial and ethnic  diversity as a civic strength, a new study by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam concludes just the opposite, the Boston Globe reports.  The largest study ever undertaken on civic engagement in America,  E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First  Century (38 pages, PDF) is based on detailed interviews with nearly thirty thousand residents in forty-one communities. The multiyear study found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings. According to Putnam -- author of Bowling Alone, which details the decline of civic engagement in the United States -- people living in more diverse communities  tend to "distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television."

While diversity may make people uncomfortable, discomfort isn't necessarily a bad thing. Recent scholarship has found that cultural differences can produce a dynamic give and take, generating solutions that might have eluded a more homogeneous group. Still, Putnam's study -- first published in Scandinavian Political Studies -- adds to the growing body of research indicating that more diverse populations seem to extend themselves less on behalf of collective needs and goals.

The findings emerge amid intense political debate about issues such as immigration and race-based admissions to schools. Putnam, a liberal academic whose own values put him squarely in the pro diversity camp, worries that many who pick up the report wil  read into it what they want to, and some conservatives are already citing his findings as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to a nation's social fabric. Putnam argues,  however, that the negative effects of diversity can be remedied with targeted efforts and that increasing diversity in America is not only inevitable but ultimately valuable and enriching.

"It would be unfortunate if a politically correct progressivism were to deny the reality of the challenge to social solidarity posed by diversity," he writes in the report. "It would be equally unfortunate if an ahistorical and ethnocentric conseratism were to deny that addressing that challenge is both  feasible and desirable."

Although progressives seem uncomfortable with the study's results, who is more tribal than progressives and the little tribes within it? How often have I had to sit in a circle among progressives and meditate,  hug, dance, chant, or otherwise bond? It is worse than church or a fraternity house. When those progressive gatherings are "diverse," they don't mean by politics, religion (unless exotic)  or even by geography. When I go to progressive gatherings up in the woods somewhere wearing my Dallas Cowboys cap and introducing myself as an insurance person from The Big D I notice that solidarity is not what it might be.  They do hug me when ordered to do so, but with a little shrug of repugnance. Can't blame them. We all need times to flock with our own kind and other times when a little diversity might do us good.  Speaking as a white male Christian Hypocrite from Texas,  one of many here, I have noticed that diversity is often a little provincial and maybe none the worse for that.

The World We Want to be Publicly Launched in February

Heard from H. Peter Karoff. His book, The World We Want: New Dimensions in Philanthropy and Social Change, is now in its second printing and will be launched publicly in September. More here.

Poll: Interested in a Trip to Find The world We Seek?

For more on the idea polled in the side bar go to "In Search of the World We Want".