The Family Meeting
THE FAMILY MEETING
A family meeting? What is it and why would we need such a thing?
Well, I am here to tell you that one day there will be a meeting
with members of your family and you will not be there. The question is who do you want control of it. Will you or someone else be making
the decisions?
Full disclosure, I did not come up with this idea. I read a blog with a similar theme written by a good friend of mine
and was inspired. When I approached my wife with the idea of a “family meeting” she was reluctant at first, but as we
talked through some of the topics I had in mind, she agreed that it was probably a good idea. When we tossed the
subject out to our children and their spouses, they were intrigued and on board.
Let me explain the nature of this kind of “meeting” and why I believe it is so important.
A substantial amount of
my commercial real estate business, mostly farmland, comes from families that have experienced the loss of a parent. They inherit property and do not know what to do with what was left behind. They did not have a “family meeting” to decide what would happen after mom or dad passed away or to sort family assets.
It sounds insensitive, but I would
say it’s absolutely necessary. You would be amazed how many people want to even up old family scores or suddenly
get greedy at the closing table. It’s an ugly, but avoidable, situation.
We set a date for our family meeting, and assembled an agenda with a brief description of assets that my wife and I hold. We did not discuss any figures nor liabilities, only a percentage of different asset classes.
It’s important to decide with your spouse what you are comfortable sharing beforehand. We determined that this meeting would not take over an
hour and would not be the last. We thought of it more as a kick-off meeting.
Here is what our meeting agenda looked like:
1. Opening Prayer… it seemed very appropriate to invite the good Lord into our meeting for guidance.
2. Scripture reading: 1st Timothy 6:10, this is the verse that talks about the love of money being the root
of all evil. Emphasizing that it is the love of money, not money itself, that is the root of all evil.
3. Why meet? I (a commercial real estate broker) and our daughter (an attorney) have many stories of
families that go astray because no one ever talked about the next generation’s inheritance of assets. My wife and I did not want this for our children.
4. What do your mom and dad have? This is where the agenda with asset listings was helpful.
5. What will that look like in 10 years? Obviously with growth of assets hopefully in 10 years the picture would look a bit different than it does now, but one never knows.
6. What do we hope will happen to our assets when we are gone? We tell our kids that
there will be nothing left because we are going to spend it all on horses and airplanes, teasing of course. Our wish was, and is, that all assets are divided equally in four ways among our four children but that
there are mechanisms in place for one or more to buy each other out or maybe just be sold and turned
into cash within a reasonable period of time.
8. Who gets the airplane and the horses?
9. Questions from the gallery:
No questions are off limits, but we may choose not to answer a question if
it is too personal or intrusive…This is where we were surprised by the well-thought-out questions from
our kids and their spouses that we had not thought of!
The meeting lasted a little more than an hour and when we were done, we all felt really good about what we had
talked about.
I would strongly encourage you, no matter the size of your estate or number of assets, have a family meeting.
Talk through things openly and honestly while you can!
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