CREATE YOUR LEGACY PART 3

IMPLEMENTING YOUR LEGACY This is the easiest part of the whole process. Ideally, your attorney and other advisors have participated in some or all your planning considerations (outlined in part 1 and 2 of this series). Now, your attorney prepares the necessary documents needed to implement your plan and other advisors may make arrangements for the assets they manage. A meeting is scheduled, and the documents are signed. The only thing left is an appropriate celebration. In some cases, you will want to inform others and celebrate your plans together.

To add finishing touches to “creating our legacy,” one of the most important legacies we can leave is to write “a letter to loved ones,” which is a personal letter that is written to each individual important to us. This is a private letter and is only opened after you are gone. In the letter, you can share your love, appreciation and hope for the person. You can pass on important family stories, history about our ancestors and other personal information. Lastly, if you have included charitable organizations in your estate plan, you can inform the charities of your intention and let them include your names or share your story as a testimony and example for others. Very few charities reveal financial details in telling donor stories.

An old cliché states, anyone can count the number of seeds in an apple; no one can count the number of apples in a seed. So, it is with our legacy!

People who complete their estate plans are usually very proud and realize the joy of creating a legacy. Parents know that this is one of the greatest gifts they could leave their children. If they have been able to make charitable gifts through their estate plan, while not depriving their children, they are able to experience the joy of being able to create a lasting legacy, not only to their families, but to their community as well.

“As an individual who practices charitable giving, the conversations and options offered to me by Paul Grassmann from Thompson & Associates that would serve my top values priorities of ‘food for the hungry’ and ‘housing for those in need’ was accomplished with strategic donations to my selected charities and also created significant tax advantages for me. I found this complimentary service offered by United Church Homes a real advantage to me and those charities I choose to make gifts to for the benefit of those I elect to serve with my gifts.”

If you would like to learn more about discovering your legacy, please contact Gloria Hurwitz, Vice President of Advancement at ghurwitz@uchinc.org or 740.751.8702. United Church Homes makes available to its friends and stakeholders a complimentary values based estate planning service from Thompson & Associates. This service is designed to help individuals and couples think through their legacy to create a comprehensive estate plan.

In the first two installments of this three-part series, we discussed what is our legacy, how we discover it, and plan for our legacy. To get a copy of part one or two of this series, please contact Gloria Hurwitz, Vice President of Advancement, at ghurwitz@uchinc.org or 740.751.8702.