Money, Love & Legacy
Families confuse money, love and legacy in all kinds of ways. Intergenerational conversations about these subjects are often postponed until it’s too late. The unfinished business between generations haunt children after parents die and interfere with family relationships while everyone is still alive. Money, Love & Legacy: Conversations That Matter Between Generations addresses these issues and provides a road map for these crucial conversations.
Why I Wrote Money, Love & Legacy
Whether it’s a talk about money, the expression and actions of love or the legacy with which a parent will be remembered, if we fail to initiate the important conversations from the heart, we miss out on the chance to clear up misunderstandings, forgive wrongs and resolve unfinished business.
Too often, when a parent dies, we’re burdened with feelings of anger, guilt, shame, doubt, abandonment and regret about a relationship that is central to our life. These feelings, often unconscious, infrequently articulated, interfere with our ability to move ‘cleanly’ through our grief. Having the conversations before it’s too late can spare us all that.
I wrote this book with the understanding of how difficult it can be to start these conversations. I provide guidelines for you in a variety of areas – the practical, the emotional and the spiritual. I share my own experiences of having, and not having, crucial conversations with my family, as well as the experiences of people who were kind enough to share their thoughts, fears and concerns with me about unfinished business within their own families.
I offer you some food for thought, some inconvenient truths and some guidelines for carrying on crucial conversations about issues of money, love and legacy between you and your parents or you and your adult children. Together, I hope they provide navigation tools for intergenerational dialogue, appreciation and, where necessary, forgiveness and blessing.
Hundreds of books can give you the details of estate and financial planning. I wrote this one to provide a different framework for thinking about relationships between generations. Parents and children don’t like to think that money and love have any relationship to each other. Unfortunately, this is a myth; money insinuates itself into family relationships whether we like to admit it or not.
