As Kelly Lavigne, J.D. wrote in Kiplinger a few years ago, legacy planning is about a lot more than money. Lavigne may have been anticipating the recent trend, known as heritage travel or ancestry tourism, a topic featured in the latest Kiplinger issue. “Folks go to their homelands to see sights their forebears saw, taste foods that inspired family recipes,” ” Jackie Hogan writes In the book Roots , “giving us the feeling that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.”
While ancestry tourism has become popular in our increasingly virtual world because people are “looking back” at earlier generations of their family, at our Indiana estate planning law firm, our attorneys are finding that clients want to not only explore their own heritage, they want to leave one for their heirs.
Ideally, at Geyer Legal Group, PC, our lawyers are able to bring together family members of different generations to coordinate an overall plan that includes sharing values as well as wealth transfer. In fact, in order to enable multi-generational meetings, we offer appointments by phone and video conference using Zoom or FaceTime. We know that multi-generational planning involves transferring assets, but it also includes sharing some incredibly important intangibles — family traditions and values.
In today’s world, “heritage assets” are often in digital form, with our social media accounts containing a wealth of personal messages, photos, and video clips. To complicate matters, social media websites often have such strict privacy policies that heirs may be barred from gaining access to parents’ accounts. The laws are constantly evolving to deal with these issues, but not all systems have fully caught up with the new realities of technology. At Geyer Law, we do everything possible to help clients protect their digital assets.
That “feeling of being part of something bigger than ourselves”? We want to help our clients pass down their heritage to ensure that marvelous “heritage tourism” feeling of being “part of something bigger than themselves.”
– by Ronnie of the Geyer Legal Group, PC Blog Team
