Thinking About My Legacy

Such is probably the circle of life, growing up I never thought about my legacy. When you are young, death is an abstract concept. But as I get older and death goes from abstract concept to a certainty with a ticking clock, it starts to fill up more of my idle thinking. What do I want the world to look like when I am gone?

I grew up on a farm and for the most part, know nearly every inch of it well because I spent time on every inch of it turning seeds in the soil into a crop that could be sold for money to pay the bills. After I left the farm for a career in engineering, the farm continued to grow so I don't know some of the newer parts like I do the original parts, but it feels like a home to me. For those on the outside, it is a piece of dirt that grows crops on it during the summer but for me, it is decades of my life and the memories that we made on that land. 

So it was a bit of relief and not much of a surprise when my parents told me that they planned to give us the land someday when they were gone and their wishes were that we didn't sell any and keep it intact. My brother and I were agreeable to that but knew that at some point, we were going to have to do some significant planning in ordering to turn that desire into reality.

Under current tax laws, when you die the government wants it's share of what you have scraped together over the course of your life and they do that by taxation. How much you are taxed depends on where you live and what things you owned upon your death. If you have a bank account, it can be as easy as just giving the government a set percentage of the money in that account and you can keep the rest. But when your asset is something more permanent like land, it can become tricky. I can't give the government a percentage of the land. They require cash. This causes many in similar situations to have to sell some of the land in order to pay the tax bill, something that went against my parent's wishes. Then you can expand the time horizon a bit and with every new generation the land passes to, there is a new tax bill to be paid and as the land increases in value, so does that amount of taxes to be paid. This was the conundrum that my brother and I have been contemplating for the last couple of decades since our parents told us their wishes for after they were gone.

Another layer that has been on our minds is personal attachment to this land. My brother and I grew up on the land. We have probably ingested and breathed in enough of the soil over the years that it is part of our genetic makeups at this point. Our children however are different stories. They grew up off the farm and have only visited it as we visited it. They don't have the memories or the attachment to it that we do. Their kids will have even less attachment and their grandkids even less. When something becomes less meaningful to each succeeding generation and practically speaking, as the numbers of descendants expands and the farm must be shared between more people, the inherited value also becomes less. As some point, the value isn't going to be worth the trouble for something that you have no personal attachment to and the likelihood of it being pieced out and sold increases.  

So what does a person do? That is something we started off to solve about a year ago.