Mark your calendars: January 28 is International LEGO day, which celebrates the date when the patent for the globally famous plastic brick system was filed.
Since the 1940s, people have been creating their own worlds, brick by brick, with LEGOs. With an estate plan, you can help your loved ones build a great future. Make your estate plan as specific as you want by providing step-by-step instructions for how you want them to honor your legacy. Or give them the resources to bring their vision to life, no strings attached.
Either way, an estate plan—like LEGOs—makes a great gift that can be enjoyed by generations to come.
Draw Inspiration from LEGOs for Your Estate Plan
International LEGO day honors the legacies of the Danish father and son whose passion and creativity spawned one of the best-selling toy lines of all time. The system approach to LEGOs has made it infinitely upgradeable, able to piggyback on changing tastes while remaining timeless.
LEGOs can inspire not only hobby builders but also estate planners. Like LEGO sets, estate plans can be built in any way imaginable. If you can dream it, you can build it with an estate plan that customizes your legacy and lays down generational building blocks.
Here are a few estate planning ideas from popular LEGO sets.
Dream House
For many families, memories are rooted in the places they call home. As children move away and families spread out geographically, there may be a special place, such as a grandparents’ home or a vacation home, that everyone returns to for holidays, family reunions, and other special occasions.
Passing down a home can keep it in the family, ensuring that new memories are made and old ones are kept alive. There are several ways to leave your home to loved ones, including through a will, co-ownership, a trust, a transfer-on-death deed, or a limited liability company.
Because the family may not want to deal with maintaining and upkeeping the home, an alternative is to leave a monetary gift that the beneficiary can use to purchase a new house.
World Travel
Among younger generations, there is an emphasis on spending time and money on experiences rather than amassing material goods. An Eventbrite survey found that nearly 80 percent of millennials would choose to spend money on an experience over buying an object they desired.[1]
Travel is a major part of the so-called experience economy. Most bucket lists include at least one travel destination.
An estate plan gift can help loved ones cross off bucket-list destinations and fulfill their dreams of seeing the world. Travel money can be gifted to an individual or set aside for a group trip that lets the family visit a special destination.
Education
No gift keeps on giving quite like an education. Educated people are more likely to reap benefits throughout their life. More education is often linked to higher income, which is in turn linked to greater wealth and better health.
Money placed in a trust for education can come with attached terms that a trustee oversees. For example, the trust may specify that the funds may only be used to pay for a college education or a vocational training program.
Give Back
The legacy wishes of some individuals extend outside their immediate family and are focused on the greater good. For the philanthropically minded, a charitable gift can support a cause that they are passionate about.
Maybe you are committed to supporting disadvantaged youth or preserving wildlife. And you might want to encourage your beneficiaries to carry on your legacy of giving back once you are gone. Both can be addressed in an estate plan.
As a bonus, charitable contributions offer tax advantages. Charitable contributions can minimize estate taxes, leaving more for your loved ones and providing for a good cause at the same time.
Build Your Legacy. Talk to An Estate Planning Attorney.
LEGOs have brought decades of joy to people of all ages. Thoughtful estate planning can do the same.
An estate that spells out exactly how beneficiaries are to use inherited assets is comparable to a LEGO set that provides building instructions. Another option is to pass down assets in a lump sum, without instructions, giving recipients an open-ended gift that can be used however they want. But be careful—just like LEGO pieces that are left out, your loved one’s inheritance could be snatched up by creditors, a divorcing spouse, or used up quickly if you give it to them in one lump sum.
Legacies are part inspiration, part follow-through. It took a patent office filing to launch the LEGO empire. To this day, LEGO is owned by a grandchild of the company’s founder.
Extending your personal empire into the future—to your children, great-grandchildren, and beyond—requires executing estate plan documents and updating them periodically. To start building your estate plan, contact our office and schedule an appointment.
[1] Millennials: Fueling the Experience Economy, Eventbrite, https://eventbrite-s3.s3.amazonaws.com/marketing/Millennials_Research/Gen_PR_Final.pdf (last visited Dec. 22, 2023).
Posted in: Estate Planning