172 sats \ 8 replies \ @freetx 7 Apr \ on: Sunday Survey: What percent of your current BTC stash will you leave your kids? bitcoin
Warren Buffet famously said: I will leave my kids enough so that they can do something, but not enough so that they can do nothing.
Years back, when I was an independent IT consultant, one of my clients was a law firm that specialized in estate planning / wills / etc. As such, I got to see lots of the family issues that they deal with regularly.
I can say with certainty that a sure-fire way to screw kids up completely is to give them lots of money
Its completely rational that an 18 yr old - that knows they will inherit say 20M - will choose to do nothing with their life. Why study hard at school? Why start out at the bottom rung job stressing out during monday morning commute? Why do any of those things when, by the time dear old dad dies, you will be getting more money than 99.9% of the population.
Most of them wind up dealing with the feeling they've wasted their life. When you live in a nice house, but your dad paid for it, it winds up undermining all your feelings of self-worth. Notably, these types of kids tend to lean very far left....which is an interesting dynamic.
Very interesting thoughts. What’s your recommendation? I have two young boys and will be able to provide them with a lot, but don’t want to do too much.
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Its a really tough balance. I think about that father alot (who had 500M and left his daughter 100M). I mean sure you can only leave your kid $1m but then what....give the rest away? That leads to its own turmoil with the kids as they feel you gave the money to strangers....
I don't pretend to know the answer honestly. The lawyers in the office used to say "giving away money is 10x harder than making it" and I understand their view.
Some families do a tiered approach: $1m trust at 25....then $5m at 35....$5m at 45...etc.. Others try to do "merit" based giving: $1m when graduating college, $1m when you get married, etc etc
Neither system is perfect and both can be either gamed by kids or abused in the sense that it just leads them to do nothing substantial with their lives.
One father invested all his money back into his company at time of his death (of which his children werent at the time shareholders in) and said that his kids should get jobs in the company and work their way up into an shareholder position.
No easy solutions, to be honest.
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Ah thanks, great options to consider. No easy, but makes sense
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Purely anecdotal in this case. It was just that, for whatever reason, those kids wound up disproportionately driven the leftist causes.
There was one that stands out to me (because I know it turned into a big lawsuit within the family). The father had made 500-600M in medical device development. His adult daughter became a big Bernie supporter and brought her new BF to dinner and they all had a big argument. This led to the daughter then saying she was refusing anymore contact with her father, no more visits, dinners, etc.
The father was obviously pissed off by this and contacted the lawfirm to see what he could do to alter / reverse the trust. His point was, its fine to not like my politics and lecture me about the evils of money....but then you can't simultaneously live off the money I made. In the end, wasn't much he could do, so it led to them not talking, and both parties only communicating via the lawfirm.
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I don't know anyone like this but it rings true. Makes me think that it's the same exact problem on the micro and macro levels -- in macro, it's often called the resource curse.
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It has already been said, but I’ll say it again. We as parents should be looking to erase generational trauma. Im thinking that could include the trauma of not having any direction due to inheritance. I don’t like calling that trauma, yet I’m struggling to find the words to describe it.
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Nope, this is a leftist meme to destroy families and convince people to "donate" their money i.e. give to organizations they are beneficiaries of, truly diabolical -- but keep listening to friends of Bill Gates, maybe after your tenth jab you could just "donate" most of your stack to Pfizer directly.
OR raise your kids to not be unambitious losers you want to have fun watching stay weak.
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