Farm Estate GPS

Do you want to know an interesting fact? It’s often easier to do the farm succession planning when you know one of the kids will sell their land someday. At least it’s known. But then there are times when parents say, “I don’t know if he will sell or not. He’s rather...

It seems like we spend most of the time in estate planning determining “who is getting what.” After several meetings and some number crunching, the difficult decisions get made and there’s an agreement in principle about how the family wants things to happen. Then the...

Working with families and their attorneys is one of the most interesting aspects of my job. We rarely have input as to which attorney we are working with unless the client asks. Regardless, we always prepare an agenda and organize the critical information for a very...

Excuses, excuses, excuses! Do you know people who always have an excuse? I’ve been involved in athletics all my life. Through high school and college, I was aware of teammates who consistently had excuses for things that went wrong. I really dislike excuses. Although,...

Choosing an advisor … a tough decision? Or an easy decision? The vast majority of farm estate plans that I see are the result of many different advisors providing input on an estate or financial plan over a course of time. There’s usually an attorney involved at some...

One of the rules around my own family deals with the obvious. That “obvious” is that at some point, we will all make mistakes. As humans, we have the tendency to throw down the judgment card on other people. We would like to judge that others are worse than us, or...