Parenting Grown Children: What Dr. Spock Forgot to Tell Us

Leaving a Legacy:The Great Transfer of Wealth from us to our adult kids. Is it for real?

Here's what the headlines tell us: The greatest wealth transfer in history is here and we are the source of those assets. Yes. Some $84 trillion in our investment accounts, wallets and collectibles are set to change hands over the next 20 years, according to various economists whose job it is to run the numbers and make forecasts.

As far back as history goes, parents have passed on--transferred--to their children their acquired wealth. But something different is going on today. First off, there's exponentially more accumulated wealth involved thanks to a booming economy that started gaining traction after World War II and has continued to make gains. In 1989, for instance, total family wealth in the U.S. was $38 trillion (adjusted for inflation). By 2022, that wealth had tripled to $140 trillion.

Along with that, there's a large base making that distribution. Some 73 million baby boomers are aging and are beginning to reach the end of their life cycle. So there are a lot of us who are about to spread that wealth around via our wills and estates, such as they are.

Not all boomers are equal of course. Some of us will leave our children a few thousand dollars, a home or not much at all. Inequality reigns. But plenty of us may be able to pass along thousands if not a few million dollars worth of assets. The recipients will be our adult children and our grandchildren, that is Gen X (born between 1965 and 1980), millennials (1981-1996) and Gen Z (1997-2012).

The transfer is already underway, thanks to how generous many of us who have the wherewithal have been.  As I've noted in previous posts, we have been sharing our good fortune in the here and now--helping our children with a downpayment on a house, paying their way through college or gifting them money for an entrepreneurial venture. As a New York Times  article on the Great Transfer put it:

Heirs increasingly don’t need to wait for the passing of elders to directly benefit from family money, a result of the bursting popularity of “giving while living” — including property purchases, repeated tax-free cash transfers of estate money, and more — providing millions a head start.

Similarly, with a headline that read, "What does it take to buy a house? Increasingly, Mom and Dad," the Washington Post reported that "nearly 1 in 5 young adults said their parents have helped with rent or mortgage payments in the past year."

More specifically:

In 1994, 1.6 percent of first-time home buyers under 35 had a co-borrower age 55 or older. By 2022, after a pandemic-era spike, that figure had more than doubled to 3.7 percent, matching a high set in 2015.

A separate analysis of federal mortgage data set by Redfin suggests the trend in co-signers above 55 years old on younger home buyers’ purchases picked up even more in 2023.

But is the Great Wealth Transfer for real? Will we be able to pass on the enormity of our assets? I have my doubts.

I'm no economist and one anecdote does not a dent in an economic forecast make. But I know from my recent personal experience, it is jarringly and horrifyingly expensive to care for an infirm spouse and/or for a frail and ill us. We are not necessarily dying at 80 (as the economists figure in their forecasts) --we're living into our 90s. Not all of us will get there, of course, but more to the point, will we age into our 80s and  90s with our minds and bodies intact. I can tell you, the costs of caring for a spouse who has had a debilitating stroke or is suffering from dementia or Parkinson's disease--to name three of the top health debilitators among the elderly--can wipe out savings in a flash.

But that's a blog post for another day. Meanwhile, let's just be grateful if we are among those who benefitted from an enormous economic expansion. It helped us pull together a small pot of wealth with which we can help our adult children now and, if we're lucky, boost our grandkids later. Let's hope our kids are able to benefit from the Great Wealth Transfer.

painting: "The Ferryman," Ivan Canu

 

 

 

 

 

 

Living Our Legacy: Keeping our kids and grandkids up to date on our past.

 

I recently found an essay I wrote about five years ago about sharing--or failing to--my life story with a granddaughter, of finding out she had to Google me to learn more about my career. Our lives reflect the history of our times and that's reason enough for our grandkids--and our adult kids--to know how the two (our lives and the times we lived through) intersected.  Here's my essay (updated from a previous post), warts and all, plus lessons learned.

My Granddaughter Googled Me

Given the teen preference for texting, an email from a granddaughter in Massachusetts to me in Maryland was a surprise. The subject line even more intriguing: Is this You? it read. The body of the message held links to articles I'd written. A click and I was reading a piece I'd penned for the Washington Post in 1978; another in 1983.

I emailed back: “Unless there's another Penelope Lemov alive in this land, yes. that's me.”

More to the point: Why was my 15-year-old granddaughter sending me links to long-ago and far-away articles? Why, in short, had she Googled me?

The prosaic answer was this: She was applying to a summer program in journalism and had to write an essay about her interest in the arts of communication and the media. One paragraph was about her grandmother (that's me) being a journalist, and she evidently checked that out--looked for proof--by calling up some of my stories.

I am still a journalist--part-time now. But when my granddaughter was born and until she turned 11 I was a full-time editor at a national magazine, having worked my way up from staff writer. 

That being so, the question nags at me: Why did she have to Google me to find out about my standing as a journalist? When I asked the grandfather (aka my husband and a lawyer who once worked for the U.S. Congress) what he thought, he reminisced about all the legal and political issues he had shared with this granddaughter once she was old--or interested enough--to understand.

I had not. My granddaughter knew I had had a career but she had no idea what that was all about. I never talked to her about it. When I went to visit her or she came here, I kept my grandparenting focused on the quotidian. I was observing, getting a feel for what she cared about, thought about, was interested in and how I could add background, anecdotes or information to her concerns. I didn't bring my world to her.

I must have shared a funny story or two--when interviewing sources we journalists are a riot. Sometimes. But I hadn't discussed what I wrote about or the many climbs and plateaus, hurdles and low points I faced--from my first job answering letters to the editor at Time magazine to ending up as an editor and as a columnist on municipal finance at Governing magazine.

"She absorbed some of it by looking around," my daughter said when I brought up the missed opportunities. My home office, which doubled as my granddaughter's bedroom when she came to visit, had various memorabilia hung on the wall for my own viewing pleasure--a plaque for a journalism award, a fake Washingtonian cover with my face on it.

If I ever finish the memoir I'm writing about my years at Time Inc (an aggressively sexist time in the work place in general, in journalism in particular and at Time Inc especially), my children and grandchildren will know more about what this grannie did with her life and what life was like when she did it. It's an important part of the legacy we leave. The life choices we made reflect our values and give our children and grandchildren at least one road map--hopefully among many others--about what paths there are in life and ways to deal with some of the stickier issues life can throw at you.

The written version may be where I'm heading in terms of explaining myself and my world to my grandchildren, but in the meantime, the idea that one granddaughter had to Google me to learn about my career is a reminder (note to self) to share the past--the good stories, fun anecdotes, and rich experiences--with our family in the here and now. It's an on-going story, even if we capture it in a final form some time down the road.

painting: Lesser Ury

Leaving a Legacy: The gift of clean closets and cleared out basements

Long-time readers know how I've ranted about an important part of the legacy we leave our children. That is, besides the assets and the sense of our values we leave our children, we should clean out the mess of papers and junk stored in our closets, basements, attics and crannies of our house. I have friends who don't want to touch the many storage places in their basement: "Let the kids take care of it," is what they tell me. For them, that's 45 years of accumulated stuff they're asking their kids to sort through and disburse.

I won't rant on. I'll leave it to Carolyn Hax to back me up. A reader--the daughter of a "widowed, healthy, vibrant mom"--says her mom refuses to go through her belongings and pare down the massive amount of stuff and old furniture in her house. "She says that 'someone else' can take care of it," the reader writes. The 'someone else' is the daughter who feels saddled with the enormous chore that lies ahead. "I feel trapped, and I can't enjoy the present with my mom without feeling anger over the future."

Here's Hax's answer:

As long as you’re okay with handing over control of where the stuff ends up, you can hire a company to clean out the house: all the paper, all the clothes, all the toxic cleaning solutions, every stick of furniture. It’s not cheap but can be cheaper than you’d expect, especially if the projected sale of some contents can offset the final price. Get a few estimates — ask real estate agents for names — pull those treasured photos and letters out for yourself, then drop the proverbial match.

The practical answer may help the daughter. But is this what we want to happen to our stuff? Are there treasures buried in a closet or photo album or old letters that should be kept ase part of family history? A lot of meaning can seep into small kindergarten drawings or a large old sofa. Do we really want it all dumped? And if we do, why not start dumping some of it--a bag a day--into the trash now. I have to admit I might not have gotten started on my "'piles of papers" and assorted belongings (from our parents as well as us) if I hadn't sold my house and moved to a smaller apartment with no storage space. That was an incentive to get the job done.

Hax notes that, for our kids, sorting through our stuff after we've left this world--stuff that's suffused with memories of us--and "sending it on a dumpster ride is not for the faint of heart." It is, she writes, "a heavy emotional saddle." We can spare them that.

painting: Picasso, Still Life

 

 

Leaving a Legacy: Keeping mum about our will and estate plan

I do not have the complication in my life of a second marriage and stepchildren. That means my adult children do not have to worry about whether step brothers or sisters will complicate the inheritance of the worldly goods their father and I leave behind.

I mention that because, experience-wise, I was unprepared for a complaint in a Philip Galanes Social Qs column from a reader whose stepchildren have stopped talking to their father (the reader's husband of two years but partner of 20). The husband's children asked for and were granted access to the terms of their father's will. They didn't like what they saw--their stepmother (the author of the letter to Galanes) stood to inherit a chunk of the father's property and money--and that's when the silent treatment began.

Galanes answer is specific to the problem of the letter-writer and the tricky business over property. But most of his observations are general enough to hold wisdom for us all.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that your husband’s children behaved atrociously — both by counting their father’s money as if it were their own and by disrespecting your relationship of two decades. I am not shocked by this story, though. Inheritance often brings out the very worst in people.

The gist of the rest of his answer was a version of this basic truth: We love our children but what we do with our worldly goods is none of their business, until it is (and we're no longer here to hear the arguments). There's this caveat: If we are favoring one child over another (one, say, is more successful financially than the other), we would be wise to alert them to our reasoning, an issue that I discuss here  and here.

credit: painting by Pierre Bonnard

Leaving a Legacy: Clear out the stuff your kids won't want

 

This is a post I wrote several years ago. It's my simple guide to right-sizing or downsizing or just cleaning and clearing out closets that are jammed too full of stuff.  My motivation for clearing my closets (and attic storage) was a move from a house to an apartment. But another incentive was in play: I didn't want my kids to have to clear my boxes of no-longer-relevant papers and artifacts when I am no longer around.

I learned recently that my approach is in keeping with a Swedish concept called döstädning (literally “death cleaning”) that's been in the news of late. Margareta Magnusson explained it all in her book, "The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning."

For those of you who are moving to smaller quarters or just feeling the heaviness of storing too much stuff in the nooks and crannies of your home or want to "gift" your children clean closets, check out Death cleaning or read my post (reprinted below). If I may pat myself on the back, my old post still offers timeless advice without the downbeat name.

Rightsizing: How I cleared my closets and dumped all the stuff my kids didn't want.

“You are my inspiration,” my friend Eva tells me. She’s not referring to anything creative or ingenious I’ve done. The reference is to the method that helped me downsize/right-size from a sprawling 4-bedroom suburban home (where Paterfamilias and I brought up two children) to a tight, two bedroom urban apartment that’s short on storage space. It's a method that would work for anyone who wants to lighten the storage load in their house, whether or not they are moving out or just tackling the untackleable during the corona quarantine.

My inspirational mantra--You won't need to know Sanskrit to follow it--is this: A bag a day.

Prosaic, perhaps. It's not the full Marie Kondo, but it worked. Every day I would fill a bag (the gold standard: a large black garbage bag) with stuff to either give to our children, gift to charity or toss in the garbage. No matter how tired I was after work, I would head for a closet or a file cabinet or a dark recess of the basement and fill a bag—sometimes it was only the bronze standard of a brown paper lunch bag. Consistency was the point: a bag a day.

Sometimes it was easy. I came across file drawers full of old photographs—from the days when camera shops processed your film and gave you doubles of all your photos.  All duplicates in my file drawer were dumped in a bag, along with both sets of photos of the backs of the heads of my children, or a fuzzy focus, or of people I no longer knew or cared about. Ditto for the negatives. Thumbing through envelope upon envelope of old photos was an emotional trip down memory lane but the save/no-save decisions were mindless.

More mindful was the china, glassware, porcelain figurines, silver-plated candelabras  and other objects we inherited from both sets of parents. When our mothers were young women growing their families and enlarging their households, they both collected the same sorts of things. Though one set of parents was more affluent than the other, both mothers had accumulated sets of silverware—8 places setting for one, 18 for the other. The candelabra was smaller for one than the other, which was not only large but had many Rococo branches. (Whenever there was a storm and our house lost its electricity, the candelabaras and their three candles apiece lit our way through the dark evening.) Both mothers had collected sets of hand-painted tea cups that had been displayed on bookcases and side tables in their homes. Both had porcelain figurines—peasant figures playing the flute or herding one of Bo Peep's lost sheep—that graced their bookshelves or sat on coffee tables and end tables.

I’d had these objects in storage in my basement since we inherited them. Would my children want them? I took out my iPhone, snapped a shot of my mother’s gold-rimmed dinnerware and texted it to my daughter-in-law. “Would you like this?” I asked this mother of three of my Grands. Within a minute her ping came back at me: “I haven’t used my wedding dishes yet.” 

For sentimental reasons, my daughter took a few of the hand-painted tea cups but the porcelain figurines and candelabras met universal resistance. I closed my eyes, held my nose (figuratively speaking) and put it all in bags for charities that, presumably, will sell them to pay some of their bills. My one flirtation with "monetizing" these treasures came when I opened a box filled with fur jackets and stoles my mother had amassed. (My father was a furrier.) I went up on eBay to see what the market was for them. The answer: Not worth my time or effort to sell. They got packed up with the porcelains.

It was guilt-inducing but easier to part with the inherited items. What of the things I had collected or amassed? I had written regularly for the Washingtonian Magazine for a dozen years back in the 70s and 80s. I had every issue of the magazine from that time in my basement. I asked myself, Would my grandchildren read these? Would they even look at them? We all know the answer. I tore out a few articles that represented the variety of stories I had written, promised myself I would digitize them for posterity and recycled the rest of it.  Ditto with other clips from my pre-Internet, freelance years: save a few; dump the rest.

Paterfamilias's boxes of law briefs from big cases he had worked on met the same fate. He had to do a lot of shredding, but he made his way through it slowly and methodically.

We started our purge a few months before we put our house on the market so there was no need to rush. Just a bag a day. That held for serving platters, pots, pans, small appliances. I had to harden my heart, but I was amazed at what I could part with once I set my mind to it. Add it felt good to know I was fulfilling part of my legacy to my grown children: clean closets. That is, when the time came and I was no longer around to do it, they wouldn't have a mess of stuff to clear out.

We moved into our apartment nearly four years ago. I have yet to miss a pot or platter or candlestick holder.  Come Spring, what I miss is my garden. But I saved a few pots for that.

photo: P Lemov

painting: Piecemeal Rhythm by Hilary Pecis

Money Matters: When our heirs get ahead of themselves (and us).

We have an elderly cousin. He never married and lives alone in a Park Avenue apartment where the walls are lined with old paintings that may or may not be worth a small fortune. His closest relatives (besides us and some second cousins) are two nephews. One of them has struggled financially, and our cousin helped his nephew when he was in crisis a decade ago. Now the nephew has called his uncle and asked for help again, only this time he framed his request as "an advance on my inheritance."

Our cousin was shocked, hurt and angry--at the presumption of inheritance and because this was his nephew's first contact with him in more than a year. 

Maybe because this happened within our family, we--the editorial we that is-- weren't surprised to read a similar case of entitlement in a Social Qs. This time, it was a grown-up grandson. The grandmother had invited the family, including the grandson and his wife, on an all-expenses-paid cruise to Alaska. The grandson couldn't make it--he and his wife are expecting a baby soon. But the grandson didn't just send his regrets. He asked his grandmother for a cash gift equal to what she would have spent on him to join the family trip. He suggested she donate the money to the baby's college fund.

"I  am stunned," the grandmother writes to Philip Galanes. "I was happy to help them with wedding expenses and part of the down payment on their first home. But I told him this is not how life works. Was I wrong?"

Before I share Galanes' wise answer to the stunned grandma, I'll let off a little steam. What is it with this sense of entitlement to a parent, grandparent or uncle's "fortune" before they have closed out their lives? If a close family member has a financial emergency, why not make the case for a loan, preferably with a payback schedule? Okay. Steam vented.

Galanes was not sympathetic to the grandson's request."You know it's bad when I'm shocked," he wrote.

"I see two ways of reading your grandson’s nervy request: He may be an entitled young man who has grown too comfortable counting your money as his. Or — and this requires some compassion — freaked out by the pending responsibilities of parenthood, he might have made a silly cash grab.

In either event, you were right to refuse him. Your generous offer to spring for a family vacation does not oblige you to make compensatory payments to those who are unable to attend. I would have a follow-up conversation with your grandson to clear the air.

...Tell him he is not entitled to your money and your invitations do not include an option to collect their cash value instead.

But that's not all Galanes had to say:

Let him know, too, that his behavior was hurtful, and risked making you feel like a walking ATM.

Which is exactly how our cousin felt. And why he's taken his ATM out of service.

painting: Marius van Reymerswaelle

Leaving a Legacy: Passing on the passwords and other digital conundrums

Pity our poor adult children. When they meet the love of their life and decide to commit to each other, they face an ordeal we didn't: Whether to and how to merge digital accounts. If newlyweds decide to save money by using one Spotify account--rather than each having his/her own--will Spotify's algorithms let one person's Latin beats seep into the other's country music vibe?

Well, that's their problem to solve. But we play a role in some of their other digital account mergers. A son may be using our Netflix account while his bride may be using her parents' password. Do we kick him off? Should they elect to leave their home bases and start a new account that's their own?

Hitting even closer to home: Many of us still carry our grown children on our cellphone family plan. Do we kick them off once they marry or are in a committed relationship? Shouldn't they start a cellphone plan of their own? After all, one day they may be putting their own children on a cellphone family plan.

There is one digital issue that affects us more directly: How do we keep passwords to our financial accounts to ourselves and yet make sure, as a matter of estate planning, that our heirs have access to them?

One expert Erin Lowry, put it this way in a Washington Post story, 

"It can be painful to talk about estate planning, ...but if one partner dies, the other will need access to important digital accounts. Adopt some sort of password manager, choose beneficiaries and set up “transfer on death” designations for your primary accounts. Even Facebook has legacy contacts who can access accounts if the holder dies."

Now that I've put that excellent advice into a blog post, how long is it going to take me to act on it? Don't ask!

photo: Maia Lemov

 

Leaving a Legacy: What about those digital assets?

We don't like to think about what life will be like when we're no longer here and whether our grown children will act like adults when divvying up our worldly goods. We may assume we've taken care of that by having an estate plan that sets down rules and guidelines for sharing our legacy. But in this new modern age, there's a piece of that plan that we may have overlooked: our digital assets. That is,  our photos and videos; messages and emails; music and e-books; movies and games; and any cryptocurrencies we may have invested in.  Some have sentimental value; others, monetary. Some we're willing to have our children, family or friends rifle through; others, not so much.

Access to our digital assets is more complicated than leaving a list of user names and passwords.  There may be those annoying but necessary "two-step" verification and security measures, some of which may require an answer to an obscure question--name of first movie? favorite song?--that our kids (or the person we've appointed to handle our estate) may not be able to answer.

A lawyer I talked to noted that the legal framework surrounding fiduciary access to digital assets is still in the early stage of development.  There's a fine line between protecting our privacy (do we want our kids reading all our old emails?) and managing our assets.

As things stand now, we can include in our will special instructions for our digital assets. Here are some suggestions of areas to cover (Excuse the legal jabber and jargon; I tried to modify where possible):  

Give your personal representative, trustee or agent a power of attorney to access the content and manage the digital assets.  

Give the fiduciary instructions to preserve, transfer or destroy information.

Prepare an inventory of digital assets, including usernames and passwords, so the digital assets can be located.  

How you keep that password list up-to-date (how many times and for which sites have you had to click on "forgot password"?) and how you retrace the answers to the "security" questions--well, that's a challenge for another day. Have you or someone you know figured that out? I'd love to have your comments.

Artwork: Self Portrait by Sarah Cain

Leaving a Legacy: Is there a fair way to divide our assets?

The two most boring words in a parent's vocabulary: Estate Planning. Within that world, the most volatile words are Unequal Shares.  Whether we have a gargantuan billion-dollar estate to divvy up among our children or just a small savings account to apportion (or somewhere between those two extremes), we may have reasons to deviate from the mean.

The mean, of course, is to divide whatever we have equally among our children. That way we are likely to head off squabbles--and possible litigation--among our heirs. It's true that we're no longer around to witness any ugliness that may ensue but as financial advisors are fond of saying, "Most of us would like to be remembered for who we were, not for what we had." (Backing that up, a 2020 Merrill Lynch study found that two-thirds of us want our family to remember us as the people we were; only 5 percent ticked the box for wanting to be remembered for our accumulated wealth.)

Would a positive memory be besmirched by our kids fighting over what we've left them? Let's go to the research again. An Ameriprise survey found that, after we were no longer around to adjudicate, 70 percent of the fights between and among siblings involved how an inheritance was divided.

“With unequal inheritances, you run the risk of causing sibling animosity,” one estate planner said. “If you go this route you need to manage expectations so you don’t have one sibling blaming another.”

Why go the unequal route? A friend of mine with a disabled daughter has set up a special trust for her care and asked her sons to manage that trust. Most of my friend's assets will go into that trust. Her sons understand why and what their family responsibilities are.

There are families where one child is super successful financially and the other works in a worthy but low-paying field. In some families, one child has remained close to her parents while the other is estranged or one child manages to visit often but the other doesn't, or one has several children and the other doesn't.

As parents we may have all kinds of valid reasons for carving our estate into unequal shares. And a number of us are doing so. In fact, the percentage of parents who left unequal inheritances to their children more than doubled between 1995 and 2010, rising from 16 percent in 1995 to 35 percent in 2010. 

The key to avoiding sibling spats over unequal shares is pre-planning. As I've noted in my posts here  and here , while you're still in good health or of sound mind, it pays to sit down with your child (especially the one with the diminished share) and explain what you're doing and why. Facts alone may not be enough. Their emotional understanding of the unequal share may be helped by our reassurance that their share of our worldly goods is no reflection of how much we love them.  Estate plan aside, it never hurts to remind our children of our unmeasurable love for them. They're never too old for that.

art: Robert Rauschenberg

Legacy Planning: How to apportion the non-monetary stuff

Our treasured goods may be stuffed in boxes under our beds, sitting in clear view on our coffee tables or hanging prominently on our walls. Aside from whether or not our kids will want the stuff, the question is how to apportion the bits and pieces that we've accumulated over our lifetimes and, for some of us, the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents as well.  Not just the stuff that has monetary value but the sentimental stuff as well.

If we leave it to chance--that is with, say, a reminder to our children and heirs to share fairly--we won't be around to suffer through a fight over the needlepoint cat pillow or the diamond earrings Poppy gave Nanny. But we shouldn't rest easy over the idea of missing the battle. We don't want our family falling apart just because we're not there physically anymore.

I've written here about how some friends have tackled the issue: making lists of who should get what, of holding "auctions" in the here and now for who gets what later and of tacking labels onto the bottoms of furniture and pictures. Into this morass comes the ever-sensible Philip Galanes and his Social Qs column. He addresses a query on this issue from a reader whose three daughters are squabbling over her two pearl necklaces that she no longer wears. The youngest has asked to borrow a single-strand necklace to wear occasionally; the oldest feels the mother has unfairly given the necklace away to her younger sister. The middle daughter could care less. There is also a triple strand necklace that no one seems interested in. The mother's plea to Galanes: "Help."

His kernals of wisdom, one of which points to the legacy the pearls represent:

Ask the daughters "if they’d like an heirloom pearl necklace. If all three say yes, remake the triple strand into two necklaces. If your middle daughter remains indifferent to pearls, give her first choice on another piece of jewelry to be claimed after you die.

Then let the girls take turns choosing from the remaining items in your jewelry box and keep a list. It may sound macabre, but letting heirs pick from personal property can be a sensible way to allocate it, in advance and without conflict.

painting: Cezanne. Peppermint Bottle