How Pondering Your Death Can Help You Today
Main Idea: Starting your planning with the end in mind can be a wise way to keep the main thing the main thing and ensure your ultimate goals are achieved in the face of so much noise in everyday life.
Donald Miller, a successful writer and business owner, discusses the value of writing your own eulogy long before your death.
While this might seem morbid at first, the idea is to clarify your ultimate life goals.
By doing this, you can align your actions today with the legacy you want to leave when the time comes.
This perspective can also be applied to financial planning. Starting with the end in mind is incredibly helpful.
It’s often said that no one lies on their deathbed wishing they had made more money.
Instead, finding peace comes from knowing that through careful preparation, their family will be taken care of.
Starting with the End In Mind
This article is not only for people on the verge of end-of-life planning. Like the eulogy exercise (has anyone ever said "eulogy exercise" before, lol), planning for your afterlife financial matters has several present-day implications.
Here a few examples:
?? Your kids are thriving in their careers, and you’re no longer as concerned about gifting them money today. This gives you the freedom to spend more on yourself, your grandkids, organizations you care about, or even consider long-term investments that you might have previously avoided due to risk or illiquidity.
?? If the reverse is true, and you feel the need to pass assets on to your children now, you’ll want to find ways to do so efficiently to avoid significant tax penalties. This may involve using your lifetime estate exemption or gifting non-cash assets, but if your ultimate goal is ensuring your children’s financial security, it’s something to consider.
?? You want to support a charity you care about, but would prefer to see those assets used during your lifetime rather than after. Charitable living trusts could be a useful tool in this case.
?? You’ve always dreamed of buying a lakehouse that your wife has wanted for 25 years, and you factor this into your investment allocation and estate planning strategy to make it a reality.
CONCLUSION
Whatever your ultimate goals are, I encourage you to lean into them more. Time moves quickly, and I've learned that as we get older and face more distractions, it becomes harder to stay focused on what truly matters. Keep the main thing the main thing.
That's all for now.
Please reference the below items to consider some of these topics more.
Good follow-up: Here's a podcast where Donald Miller actually discusses the reasoning behind writing one's own eulogy. Second, as a partner with Fidelity, here is a site I'll sometimes share with clients who want to take the first steps in exploring these heavy topics slowly.
Action Items: Writing your eulogy is a difficult practice, as it takes a lot of assuming and deep thought, but I think it's worth it.
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