Yes, It's Earth Day

Estate planning and the environment are not as far apart as you would think. Actually, they are pretty far apart, but in this post I will try to find a link.

Today is Earth Day, so we celebrate our home planet and lament what a mess we've made of it. For one day, we'll walk the two blocks to the store instead of drive, take public transit to work, maybe pull those abandoned tires out of the creek bed. Or maybe not.

If you read the New York Time, you probably saw the Magazine section last Sunday and its coverage of all things environmental. In it, there was an article about the no impact man (I sometimes feel like the no impact man, but for different reasons). Anyway, his challenge for a year was to live without generating any environmental impact. So no electricity, no garbage, walking everywhere (he lives with his wife, child, and dog in Manhattan, so it is a lot easier than those of us who don't. At least for the walking part.) The fact is, that if we change how we look at the world, and what we expect from it, then we begin to realize that a great many things are possible. We also begin to see how the decisions we make can have consequences (good and bad) that we may not have thought about when we made them.

I used to drive to the post office box I use for work. Yesterday, I realized that it was only 0.67 miles away from our house. I cannot justify driving anywhere that is less than one mile away, so I have now resolved to walk to the PO box (some more encouragement for this: I also filled up my 23 year-old diesel BMW - at $4.55 per gallon!)

Estate planning is all about thinking ahead and predicting the future - For both the attorney and the client. The decisions made today about your estate will affect future generations in ways you may never imagine. You may be mad at your children, so you respond by cutting them out as beneficiaries to your plan. In doing so, however, you will virtually guarantee a trust battle when you die.

Did the people who built the houses in this photo think about where the people who would live in them would work? Where they would go shopping? How they would get there? They probably assumed that they would just drive. As you can see in the photo, there is construction on the highway. It is being widened to accommodate increased vehicle traffic. The car in the photo is going about five miles per hour. The people who built the houses were thinking about providing housing and making money. They didn't think about increased traffic, smog, congestion, asthma, global warming, etc., but all of these things have come about because of their planning.

Estate planning is like a puzzle. The challenge is to make the pieces fit together. This requires thinking about how the plan will take effect. Similar to how we should think about the environment (since, again, this is Earth Day - so recycle your batteries!). A decision today will affect future generations in ways you may not realize right now. Think. Think. Think.