Ensuring Your Wealth Don’t Spoil Your Children
Nov 24th, 2007 by Editor
Here is an articles in the news that talks about problems of not having a Will or updated nominations. When a son was asked by his dad, what does he want to be when he grows up, this is the answer.
“I want to be a millionaire when I grow up”. The father was astonished and said, “To be a millionaire, you have to work hard. The father was taken aback when the son replied, “Dad, you work hard, I just want to inherit the millions from you.”
Click here for a bigger image.
As Malaysian grow more affluent, this situation will happen more and more. Already there are children who knows their parents are quite wealthy and waiting for the day, they get to lay hands on their inheritance. Even if you think you are not that rich, it is good to plan for this because it you own 2 or 3 properties, with the rising cost of land, those properties could be worth millions in 10 to 15 years time. Your money can spoil your kids!
So while you do your best to raise your children up to be responsible, what steps can you take to protect your children from having too much money, too soon? When you are alive, you can control your assets. What happens when you are no longer around to control your assets? You can still do so with a Will, together with a testamentary trust. With this in place, you decide when to transfer your assets to your children. For example, you can transfer a portion to them at age 25 and then the balance when they are age 30.
I’ve always been concerned that should sometime happen to me, my wife or my children won’t be able to manage my assets. It is not that I don’t trust them, I don’t trust the people around them.
When my friend passed away 2 years ago and left assets to the wife, a lot of people wanted her to invest the money in all sorts of places. Some of the people have good intentions and other, no need to say. But my friends wife is not experienced when it comes to handling money. Long story short, she made some investment mistakes and lost quite a bit and also got cheated. Luckily, she was smart enough to keep a portion in FD for the children.
I didn’t know this was possible. When I did my will a recently, the lawyer who did my will did not advise me on it. Looks like I’ll have to re write my will since i don’t want my kids to receive everything at one go
Hi Chris, many people overlook this part. Most lawyers presume that you know what you want to do with your estate and put your wishes down on paper so that it is valid from the legal point of view.
What we do is to take your concerns as well as suggest ways to address those concerns. Then we put it down on paper to have a Will that covers potentially all possible scenarios.