It is harder than talking to your children about sex. What? Talking about their inheritances. Telling heirs how much they are going to inherit is fraught with emotional trip wires for parents who may feel guilty about how much money they have or who don’t want to give their children a sense of entitlement or [...]
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Some people complain that family wealth is a curse. Kids get too much too soon. They lose motivation. Family members focus on money to the exclusion of all else. And it can lead to low self-esteem, since you inherited the money and didn’t make it yourself. All that can be true. But an article in [...]
A man who died last summer in Illinois left his million dollar estate to two actors he never met. According to an article on ABC’s Good Morning America web site, Ray Fulk, who was 71 when he died, left the two actors a half million each. Fulk lived alone and had no family. But he [...]
It is a new world with all these on line social media programs like Facebook and Twitter, not to mention email, frequent flier accounts and such. What happens to all those accounts, filled with personal memories, photos, music, and, in some cases, valuable miles that could be worth thousands? And what about online bank accounts [...]
Teenagers who grew up during the big recession may not have learned anything from it. A study by TD Ameritrade found that 40 percent of those in Generation Z, now between the ages of 13 and 22, think they are going to get a big inheritance and won’t need to save for retirement. But an [...]
A common theme in the discussion of the country’s economic future is that having so many seniors in the population will drain the nation’s financial resources. But there is another way to look at it. Seniors could be the lifesavers for many financially trouble households. A study from Canada says seniors there have $1 trillion [...]
Baby boomers are expected to leave $30 trillion to their heirs in the next 30 to 40 years. That’s a lot of rich kids in the making. But if you are one of those who has a large estate and is planning to leave it to your kids, when do you tell them what they [...]