Leaving a Legacy

It was tough finding a solution about protecting the farm through generations as a whole and we spent all of last winter going back and forth on various ideas before we finally came to something we could all agree upon. In order to complete our idea though, we were going to have to involve others more specialized in their knowledge base than we were and that would take time. As of this writing, we are 90% of the way there and hopefully in a month, we will have completed something that will better the world we all leave behind and leave a bit of a legacy.

In short, the first half of our solution was to create a trust into which we put all of the farm. By doing so, it ensures that the land will all stay together and per our wishes, never be broken up and sold at least during our lifetimes. However, tax bills are still due and succeeding generations will still have the ability to dissolve the trust and sell it off when the hassle of maintaining it becomes not worth any potential income and they would rather have money than land that they have no personal attachment to. 

So the second half of our solution was to give the land away to another entity that can preserve our wishes and not have to pay taxes every 25 years or so with each new generation. We donated it to charity.

The charity isn't just any charity but a very specialized one. This particular charity buys or is given land that is unique, endangered or somehow has extraordinary significance to our state and preserves it for eternity for others to enjoy. Because they are a not for profit charity, they don't have to pay taxes on the gift of land nor do we when giving it to them. Because there are no taxes, it can be passed in it's entirety without having to sell any of it. 

You might be asking, what does a charity that wants to preserve unique and endangered parcels of land in our state want with land with no unique qualities and can be found outside of every car window that drives across our state outside of cities. That is a good question. The charity will use our land eventually as an income source. The income that it provided for my parents and will someday provide for me and my kids, will one day go to this charity. They will use this income to buy even more land than they do today from funds they have to raise from a rotating set of donors. 

Perhaps the biggest emotional struggle of the entire deal was just coming up with a date for this gift to occur. In the end, we settled on 50 years from this year or 2076 on our nation's 300th birthday. By then, I will have passed 100 years of age and likely will not even be alive. Hopefully my children and those of my brother will be well into their retirement years and will have no further need of a regular income from the farm. Future generations, those not even born at this point, will receive no benefit from this deal other than they can say they are the descendant of those people who set up this trust and gift that will hopefully significantly change the future of our state by preserving even more lands for future generations to enjoy. 

Hopefully they and others will be able to enjoy what we have left behind, a legacy.