topics with an accountant or a financial advisor in order to get appropriate advice.
Many parents say that they do not want their children involved in the estate-planning process because they do not want to reveal confidential information to anyone other than their professional advisors. They believe their financial affairs are none of the children’s business, and it is their right to maintain that. Because of this wish for privacy, many parents put off their estate planning, believing that they must tell their children about everything they own.
This concern for privacy should not prevent your parents from going ahead with their planning. The extent of your involvement or that of your siblings or other family members can be controlled according to your parents’ wishes. It is everyone’s right to keep their financial and personal matters private if they so choose. Some parents choose to tell their children about their finances and others do not. It is very much a personal decision so you should do your best to work with it.
If your involvement in their planning goes no further than motivating them to get started, and perhaps helping them find a lawyer, you can probably alleviate most of their concerns about privacy. If they do not tell you themselves about what they own and the value of their holdings, there is no way for you to know about these things.
A compromise might be that your parents will tell you about the kind of assets they have, and possibly where the assets are located (e.g., where they bank and where title deeds are stored) without having to tell you the dollar amounts. This will allow them some amount of privacy while still allowing you and any professional advisors to understand the situation.
For example, you can understand whether the family home is owned by both parents or by only one without knowing the appraised value of it. You can know whether there is life insurance without knowing the dollar amount. You can know whether they still own shares in a business they retired from years ago without knowing the share value. In this way, you can preserve their privacy while getting going on the planning.
Even if you share the same lawyer with your parents, the lawyer is bound by solicitor-client confidentiality, which is the duty of every lawyer to keep each client’s legal affairs confidential. This can become extremely important in smaller towns where there are not many lawyers and whole families consult one lawyer about various matters. You can assure your parents that the lawyer will not share a client’s information with anyone, including family members, without specific permission from them to do so.
People also sometimes feel that during the estate-planning process, they are being pressured into revealing financial details that they would otherwise prefer to keep private. Many older people just do not like letting the world in general know how much they have put away and it makes them uncomfortable and resentful if they are pressured for that information. They should not have to reveal information they do not want to reveal to family members.
Understand that estate planning can be done without your parent having to divulge details about the amounts held in bank accounts or investments. The type of asset and the way it is held (e.g., joint owners, sole owner) are much more important in the planning process than the actual dollar amount. If your parent is concerned about giving out too much financial information, suggest to him or her that he or she divulge that information only to the lawyer, who is not allowed to tell other people.
10. Superstition
A surprisingly large number of people fear that if they write a will, they are somehow fatally jinxing themselves. They fear that the act of signing that piece of paper that talks about their death will in some inexplicable way cause their death to occur. If this were actually the case, a large fraction of our society would pass away every day, as wills are signed all over the world.
Superstitions can be hard to overcome simply because they are not really grounded in any real experience or fact, and therefore cannot really be countered with logic. A person with this kind of superstition is really suffering from an exaggeration of everyone’s natural fear of dying.
Just as opening a bank account will not cause you to win the lottery or saying hello to the dentist will not make your teeth fall out, there is no causal link between making a will and passing away. Everyone in the world dies eventually, with or without a will.
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