On August 24 of this year, my 84-year-old dad sent an email to my mom, my brother and me with the subject line “Serious Request.”

He also marked it High Priority, although, to be fair, about ¾ of his emails are marked High Priority.

Here is what he wrote (verbatim).

Dear Family,
I would like to set a date with the three of you to sit with me together for an hour for me to go over important information with each of you as to where the locations are of critical personal and financial information:
Checks
Banks
Burial documentation
Tax Information
Explanations of my filing system
Social Security Information
Trusts Information
Love, Dad

This is pretty much my dad in one email.

He is the most organized person I know. He has a system for everything, nothing gets past him, and he is always thinking ahead. He is also an optimizer. This is one of his greatest strengths and, if you ask his wife and two sons, occasionally one of his more challenging qualities.

None of the three of us operates quite at his level.

So when Dad sends a “Serious Request,” we show up.

 

The Serious Request

There wasn’t a health crisis behind the email. My dad has had a few surgeries recently, but both of my parents are doing well. He is also 84 and my mom is 82, and he’s realistic about that. His explanation was pretty straightforward: I’m 84. You guys need to know this stuff.

The four of us spent a little over an hour in his home office, which is basically his command central. He pulled out files, showed us accounts and passwords, explained his filing system, showed us how to open the safe, and went through funeral information and some of the other things we will eventually need to know.

Years ago, he bought cemetery plots near his parents in Northeast Los Angeles. During our conversation, he mentioned that he hadn’t visited his parents’ graves nearly as often as he thought he would. That got us talking about whether it actually made sense for my parents to be buried closer to Long Beach, where all of us live now.

So apparently Dad still has at least one thing left to optimize.

What struck me about the meeting was how normal it felt. It wasn’t morbid. Nobody was sick. My parents were there, my brother and I were there, and Dad was basically doing what he has always done: making sure everything was taken care of.

I left feeling pretty grateful.

 

Summer Camp

A few years ago, I was driving west on the 10 Freeway and passed Cal State Los Angeles.

Both of my parents went to college there while living at home and working. My mom became a teacher and spent her career teaching. My dad started as a teacher and moved into sales in his mid-30s.

They worked really hard and they saved. For a long time, they essentially lived on one teacher’s salary and saved the other.

My brother and I both went to UC Santa Barbara. Needless to say, our college experience looked a little different.

I remember my dad visiting me there, looking around at the beach, the campus and everything else and announcing:

“This isn’t college. This is summer camp!!!”

I thought it was funny at the time.

But driving past Cal State LA years later, I started thinking about my parents going to school there while living at home and working, compared to the experience they had given my brother and me.

And then I started thinking about our kids.

It hit me. I picked up the phone from the car and called my parents to thank them.

My parents changed what was possible for our family.

Their hard work gave my brother and me a completely different starting point. We’ve been able to build on that, and now our kids are starting from a different place again.

Dad was right about Santa Barbara. It pretty much was summer camp.  But he and my mom were the ones who made that possible.

That’s what came back to me after our meeting in Dad’s office.

I’ve been an estate planning attorney for almost 20 years. Of course the trusts matter. The tax planning matters. Having things organized matters. And someday my brother and I are going to be extremely thankful that Dad showed us where everything is and how everything works.

But when I left their house that day, I wasn’t thinking very much about any of that.  I was thinking about my parents and what they had done for us.

 

A True Legacy

That’s what legacy means to me. My parents have given us a lot more than whatever we’ll someday inherit.

And I think this meeting was part of that, too.

One of the reasons we created our Legacy Program is that I don’t think estate planning should end when somebody signs a stack of documents. Families change, assets change, people get older, and the plan needs to change along with them. Eventually, there also comes a time when your kids need to know where things are and what they’re going to be responsible for.

My dad has been serious about his estate planning for probably 30 or 40 years. He’s done plenty of sophisticated planning.  This wasn’t sophisticated.

He sent us an email. We found a day that worked. We came over and he showed us his stuff.

Then the four of us sat down and had a snack. It was a great afternoon and I’m glad we did it.

 

If your parents are getting older, maybe it’s worth finding an afternoon for a conversation like this. Or if you’re the parent, maybe it’s time to send your own “Serious Request.”