Beyond Your Estate Plan: 4 Simple Questions to Capture Your Family's True Legacy
A solid estate plan takes care of passing on your wealth, but leaving a true family legacy is all about taking the time to share your personal stories, values and memories with the people you love.
The fastest way to find out if your affairs are in order is to experience bad turbulence on a flight. Your mind immediately goes to that list of unfinished business you've been meaning to get to.
So why did a man in his 60s, with a fully completed and updated estate plan, his affairs in order as they say, tell us he realized there was still something missing?
Trust and estate planning conversations with professionals are spent almost entirely on tax, legal and financial work: Who gets what, when and under what conditions.
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If the estate plan is like building a house, then legacy is like decorating the house, filling it with pictures and memories and turning it into a home.
Part of the confusion is the word "legacy" itself. Merriam-Webster defines it as something willed to someone by a person who has died: A bequest, as in "she left us a legacy of a million dollars."
Cambridge says something similar: Money or property received after someone dies. But Cambridge has a second definition, closer to the truth: Something that is part of your history or that remains from an earlier time.
That second definition holds up better. A legacy reaches further than a family: The people who mattered to you, the people who knew you, the people whose lives you shaped.
I have little kids at home. One of them is scared of the dark, and he asked me how dads can be so brave. I borrowed a line from Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary: "You just need to find someone to be brave for."
That's how legacy works.
Legacy belongs to the family
A trust document can name who inherits the lake house. It can't explain why the lake house was built in the first place, who was the best at Family Olympics or why everyone still talks about the weekend the power was out and Nana made everyone play gin rummy by candlelight.
Families spend plenty of time and money getting the legal and financial plan right, and they should. But they often assume the legacy work will happen on its own, through osmosis, around enough holiday dinners. It doesn't. Stories get lost, conversations never get had, and memories fade.
This work doesn't require a law degree, a fortune or a weekend retreat at a lodge. It requires a willingness to start.
Every family already has a legacy
One reason families put this off is a quiet myth: Legacy work is only for the ultra-wealthy, the kind of family with a name on a building. It isn't, and the numbers back that up.
More than half of Americans, 53%, can't name all four of their grandparents, according to a 2022 survey from Ancestry. That gap shows up in every kind of family, rich or not. Wealth doesn't create a legacy. It just changes how many resources a family has to invest in preserving one.
Think about family photography. There was a time when capturing a memory meant hiring a portrait painter or, later, a professional photographer for a few occasions a year. It was an expense most families couldn't bear.
Today, nearly every parent carries a camera in their pocket that holds several thousand family photos. Families didn't suddenly become more deserving of memories. The friction of preserving them just disappeared.
Legacy is on the same path. The stories worth telling, the letters worth writing, the traditions worth naming were always there. What's changing is how much friction stands between a family and doing something about it.
Four questions beyond the estate plan
Family wealth expert James E. Hughes has spent six decades arguing that a family's balance sheet has five kinds of capital, not one:
- Financial
- Human
- Social
- Intellectual
- Cultural
Financial capital is the will, the trust and the estate plan. That part is important. The other four are where legacy work starts, and working with an adviser who understands this can be a real help.
Here are four questions, one for each capital. Answer them yourself, or ask them at your own kitchen table. None needs a long answer. Give yourself a limit, somewhere between 150 and 500 words, and write it down.
- Human capital. What advice do you have for getting through the tough days?
- Cultural capital. What are your top three movies, and why?
- Intellectual capital. Where did you grow up, and how did that shape you?
- Social capital. What is the best decision you ever made, and why?
That's enough to start. The point isn't to produce a polished document. It's to get something true on paper before it lives only in memory.
Progress over perfection
Families stall on legacy work for understandable reasons. They're busy. A new season of something started on Netflix. They assume it's for someone wealthier.
Or, more often, no one has ever invited them into the conversation. If you're the one reading this, maybe you should be the one to start the work.
I've read a lot of legal documents in this line of work and a lot of eulogies. I learn more about who someone was from the eulogy, every time.
Your estate plan tells people what they'll receive. Your legacy is much bigger than that, so don't wait until you hit turbulence to define it.
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