Like a Library Burning
FORWARD
By:
Andrew Gluck,
President & CEO
Advisor Products Inc.
Editor-at-Large
Financial Advisor Magazine
Andrew Gluck, President & CEO
Advisor Products Inc.
Editor-at-Large
Financial Advisor Magazine
As a reporter who has covered personal finance for 25 years, I was curious when a source told me about a new kind of financial and estate planning that was being taught to advisors by Scott Farnsworth. Always a cynic, I didn’t really believe there could be much new about the subject.
But I followed up and contacted Scott because I had developed a pressing personal interest in estate planning. I was about to turn 52, and my wife Mindy and I had no wills to protect our two children, Alison, 15, and Jason, 13. I called Scott and asked him to let me put his ideas to a real test: try his approach with my wife, Mindy. Scott agreed.
A few days later, I called Scott with my wife on the line. I stayed silent and listened while Scott went through one of his Priceless Conversations with Mindy. I’ll never forget what happened during that 45-minute phone call. Scott engaged my wife in a conversation about how we could pass our values, our faith, and our heritage along with our financial assets to Alison and Jason. By the end of the call, Mindy was in tears and I was emotionally shaken.
A few months earlier, Mindy and I had worked with a prominent estate planner who wrote our wills. But the 100-page document sat in a pile of paperwork in our kitchen. Mindy and I had allowed our wills to sit for months unsigned. Why didn’t we just sign them and send them back to the attorney? How could we be so irresponsible? After Scott’s conversation with Mindy, the answer was clear. While our wills contained all of the right legal remedies—trusts that could protect our kids from themselves, creditors and the IRS, they lacked the personal connection we wanted to feel. They failed to give voice to our greatest hopes for our children.
People have a natural desire to pass on more to loved ones than their money. Our humanity instills in us a need to help the next generation progress by passing on what we have learned, the ideas we hold most dear, and beliefs precious to us. Traditional estate planning fails to address this most fundamental desire. As a result, many wills go unsigned, and many people die without ever passing on their most valuable assets. Wisdom is wasted, like a library burned.
The effort to prevent this sin of wasting mankind’s fuel—our knowledge—is a noble one, but it surely will not be easy. The financial and estate planning industry is an entrenched, complex system with established financial incentives, professional roles, and educational infrastructure. Changing the established financial and estate planning system requires changing the way lawyers, insurance agents, and financial advisors think, and changing the way clients think. Though it may take five, 10, or 20 years, financial and estate planning will change and adopt the ideas laid out in this book because clients and good professionals will demand it.
This type of caring, probing, and personal planning—let’s call it story-based planning—will ultimately become the norm for practitioners because it is good for people, makes the world better, and makes our lives more meaningful. It is progress. And this book is a first major step toward reaching this worthy goal.
