Reach Your Summit Podcast

Crafting a Multi-Generational Family Legacy with Josh Jerele

• Summit Wealth Group

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What does it truly mean to leave a lasting family legacy? Join us as Jessica sits down with Josh Jerele, our expert advisor from Summit Wealth Group’s Lakewood office, to unravel the intricate fabric of what it means to think about a family legacy. Together, we promise to provide you with actionable insights that go beyond financial inheritance, diving into how values, beliefs, and family history can be preserved and cherished by future generations. Josh sheds light on impactful practices like creating videos or emails for future generations and stresses the importance of teaching financial responsibility to children early on.


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Jessica :

Welcome to the Reach your Summit podcast, where we are helping you navigate the path to a better, more secure future. My name is Jessica and I'm your host. We are presented by Summit Wealth Group and we are back for this episode with our advisor out of our Lakewood office, Josh Jerle. So thank you again for being back with us.

Josh:

Of course, great to be back.

Jessica :

Last episode which, if you didn't listen, definitely go back and check this one out we talked with Josh a little bit about estate planning and what to do if you need to set up your estate plan, and then also the other side of things, where what do you do when you inherit assets and kind of all the nuances and things that can come up that you probably don't think about until you're in that situation.

Jessica :

We started with that kind of the more nitty gritty, technical stuff, but this episode we're going to jump into kind of, I guess, the more emotional side of things, when you have a family and how you create a family legacy. So if you are passing on assets, if you are inheriting assets and your family has created a legacy around those, something that you know those assets will be used for or continued on for generations. Jumping right into that for those that kind of don't know which I had never thought of this before. I never knew anything about family legacy or leaving something like this before I started working here what does the term family legacy mean to you and what is that?

Josh:

That's a great setup for this and a great introduction for it. That is, the multi-million dollar question is what does family legacy mean to each client? So we do ask that question a lot. It's just what does this mean to you? What are some of the things that you take from previous generations and pass on? And obviously money is an asset that's incredible and it's very powerful to be able to use for good and just you know, making sure you are taking care of yourself and educating the next generation, etc.

Josh:

But legacy that love, love this topic because it is definitely much more beyond just the financial side of things.

Josh:

It's your values, it's what you believe in and the family history, et cetera.

Josh:

So really what that means is like if you don't understand that on the front end of doing financial planning, really you might be missing so much as an advisor with the family that you're working with. So we usually love to step back in our first meetings just understand what family legacy means to people, and a lot of times it is just spending time together or some of the history of like how difficult it was for their family to get to the United States or wherever they came from. So getting those stories and passing those on has been a huge part of some of the families that do this really really well. I'm always very impressed when people do videos or, you know, have an email address that they write to their kids that they can read later on. Like some of those things are just so impactful and it gets you emotional just thinking about it. But you know, beyond that, it's if you got older kids. Now there's still like time to get it figured out and like talking about some things.

Josh:

I mean one of the biggest things I see in practice is that it's never usually good to tell your kids how much money you have or how much money they're going to get, because that can demotivate them pretty quickly on oh gosh, why would I go work for that promotion?

Josh:

I'm going to inherit millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Whatever it may be. Instilling those values of being prudent with your money, living below your means, investing, staying in long-term, like some of those things are so helpful to learn early on, especially so I know, like I've got, you know, three kids under the age of five. We're trying to start instilling some of those financial values of just delayed gratification hey, that toy is really cool at the store, but maybe we'll buy it if we can, you know, work on something for the next month and achieve that goal. So a lot of those can be really really impactful long-term for people, so they're ready to inherit money or understand the family's values. So going back to like the estate planning side, like making sure you lay out a lot of those values and how you're having the money transferred later on in life as well as, is really a huge part of the legacy.

Jessica :

And I know one thing that we do at Summit that is really cool and unique is what we call the conversation cards, which plays a lot into kind of this like financial planning what do you want your legacy to be? What do you want your assets to be used for when you pass? And you kind of spearheaded this, introduced it to Summit. So can you tell us a little bit about what that looks like?

Josh:

It's a great tool. I mean, there's many ways you can administer these kinds of conversations, but really the idea is just to get these things as a conversation starter so you can talk about family legacy or spending time with people you care about, et cetera, and so we'll use those in the early meeting just to have clients have that as a starting conversation point. Okay, what does spend time with people I care about really mean? And it's amazing just to see between the two people who are in the meeting what that really means. Some people will say, oh, it's just the walk in the park on Saturday morning.

Josh:

I really enjoy seeing my kids doing that kind of stuff, and other people know it's a big family trip and we got to make sure we're doing those every year, and so it really can lay out some of those pieces and I think for a couple in that situation it's really fun for them to hear each side of the story and understand, like, what each of those components really mean to them.

Josh:

It really can change your goals when you're building out your financial plan, because one spouse may be like, oh gosh, I always think those trips are such a headache because it's a lot of work to get there and it's expensive and the kids complain or people don't have a good time. But when you hear your other significant others say, no, I love these trips, this is so valuable to me, then that now gets incorporated in the financial plan and we say we're going to start budgeting for that. Make sure you have enough assets to do that trip every year. So it's really amazing to see how those can lay out and you'll diagnose some fears that people may have about not having enough assets for their spouse if they leave. So then if you can pinpoint that fear for a client and actually help them quantitatively decide okay, hey, what happens if you pass away today? We know you've got enough coverage to make sure you guys are not gonna have to change your lifestyle at that point.

Jessica :

I think it's such a cool tool that the advisors here use. I always love when I was working more in the office and I would get to kind of type up people's notes and kind of see the conversation play out or the things that you know, I didn't know, you felt that way about this, or I didn't know, you know we weren't on the same page, but now we can come and make a compromise and figure out how that looks.

Jessica :

I have so many friends who thinking about like a family legacy. It's like they grew up going forever and they will take their kids and their kids will take their kids and like it will keep going. Yes, it's not completely about finances, but also, in a way, it is to make sure that you're set up to have those trips and create those memories in that time with people every summer. Definitely, family legacy can look a lot of different ways.

Josh:

Oh my gosh, yes Things that people don't think of.

Josh:

Yeah, it's amazing. I mean just the thing the stories you hear over the years of different clients doing different things and how it all plays out. It's just amazing to see it. You're just always surprised at how certain things can definitely stir up emotions in different ways for different reasons. But I think it's so important to communicate and that's why I love that meeting is because life is busy, life is hard, it's so many challenges and there's amazing things to be thankful for. But I think a lot of times when you sit back and you have this conversation, that's not actually specifically talking about how expensive Disney World and how hot it is in June to be there.

Jessica :

Yeah.

Josh:

Yeah, you look back and you have a different perspective of and you say, wow, like how do I communicate to my kids that this, we love doing this with them and it was so important for us that maybe you just go rent a place on the beach and say every year I'm going to be going here; you guys are welcome to come. And I think it's always good to have a little bit of a financial push for them to actually pay for their own flights or make sure they can get there on their own, but gosh, who wouldn't take a rental on the beach when you're in the middle of you know the chaos of raising young kids and finance are a little bit tighter in those early years to be able to go spend time with your family. That's an amazing legacy thing to do for your kids.

Jessica :

Absolutely. You touched on it a little bit with kind of starting things with your small children now, but what role do you feel like financial education has in creating this family legacy?

Josh:

Yeah, it's huge and it's a biggest underserved thing in the United States. When you think about going back through school and all that stuff, I mean I remember learning about what a penny was and a dime and a nickel, but like they didn't tell you how to spend money, how to invest and how to save it. The only times you really start getting into that was, you know, in high school. If you have like a home ec class where you do like a fake marriage and you're like talking about budgeting and stuff like that, but even that is still like one week you spend on your whole life, but then everyone literally everyone is going to have money and spend resources their whole life, but you don't get educated on it.

Josh:

I do love encouraging clients to just get their kids involved early on with just understanding what stocks are and how to invest it in. Hey, you got a summer job and you made X number of dollars and it's really fun to go to concerts and like spend money on things and update your car, et cetera. But instilling those values of saying, okay, well, hey, you earned $2,000 a year in the summers in high school or college, open up a Roth IRA with them and even if you're matching them and say you know, if you earn $2,000, I'll put $2,000 in your Roth IRA and then you're going to be able to see this money grow. And the nice thing is they can't touch it till they're 59 and a half.

Josh:

So you can start teaching them that stuff in those, you know, teenage years, et cetera. But really it's hard because it puts a responsibility on the parents and the family members to say I've got to actually teach them because the education system is not going to do it. You know, there's a lot of resources out there. I know of a lot of clients that use, you know, different apps and softwares that they can create like a curriculum for their kids to start learning some of those things. But really it does come down to family teaching those values and it's not always something you can just learn. I mean, every kid is unique and every human being is unique. Some people like to spend money more than others and it could be a rub for some kids to say, gosh, my parents are trying to get me to save money. But you have to push through that and try to instill those things and make sure that they're educated along the way on how to actually grow and maintain your money that you earned.

Jessica :

I feel like even just showing your kids how much you spend on things yeah, I think everybody in their adult life has come to the point where they're like how did my parents do this? I didn't know they spent this much on groceries. Or like how did they have car payments? How did like? You know, you just don't realize until you're an adult and you're in that situation paying for things yourself. So I think even creating a budget and showing your kids like this is how much our mortgage is. This is how much you know our grocery bill is every week. This is electric All that kind of stuff can be really eye opening and maybe motivate a little bit where you're like OK, well, you know, we don't have to spend everything on just fun things Like sometimes we have to also do the necessities. Yeah.

Josh:

And it's it's so broad range. I mean, like a five-year-old, like it starts with that. Like that's my. My five-year-old is the first one who's starting to like actually take some interest in money and like, okay, what is money? And she thinks it's a cool toy because it's a dollar bill and she goes and puts it in her piggy bank. But you know, when we go out to breakfast, it's not like a thing to put stress on her and be like gosh, this costs money. Like you want it to be a fun environment, like we had so much fun today. She's like what's your credit card? And she started to ask questions like why, how do you pay? Like why do? At the breakfast table you're like, oh, this is such a waste of money. Like don't say that stuff.

Josh:

Like just say like hey, you know you have to pay money because he or she's working as a server to help provide us this meal. So we're paying them money so that they can go take care of their family and pay for their own meals and like. That's the beauty of like teaching that stuff early on. Everyone has got unique stories about, like how their parents handled finances. Some people come up with basically having to raise themselves and they're really hard upbringings and it it causes a grittiness that they don't want to be poor and they do a really good job of saving. Other people have a lot of things handed to them so they don't ever understand the value of money until they get off on their own or they never actually even get that because the parents still help them out a little bit too much.

Josh:

As an adult, you just have to decide. As a parent, I got to let my kids struggle a little bit in those early years of graduating from college or whatever it may be, so they can understand the rub that we all had growing up trying to make it on our own. And I think that's the hardest thing from like a legacy standpoint is you want your kids to have a better life than what you did, and so you try to ease out a lot of those bumps in the road, but it ends up hurting them in the long run because they never learn. The worst case scenario has happened is they never learn and then they inherit a bunch of money and then they fall back into that category we talked about before, where they just spend it all on things that don't add value to long term, know long-term retention of wealth.

Josh:

So the education is so critical. Again, I don't like getting into very specifics about here's how much our house costs, or like here's how much money dad makes like, or how much money we have saved up. I think it's just better to say like here's a percentage of that we save every month. Or you know, hey, you got your birthday money, let's save 10% into your piggy bank. Or, you know, hopefully it's an investment account and it's growing, you know, rather than sitting in a piggy bank.

Josh:

Those are the things I think that are really passing on a huge legacy, because you're teaching financial responsibility to the next generation, which you hope will teach to the next one. So you don't fall into the normal spectrum of first generation creates well, second generation takes good care of it, third generation spends it all down.

Jessica :

So we've talked a lot up to this point about families and how a couple would create this for their children and so on, but we also have listeners who are single or couples that don't have children. What does creating a legacy for their life and things to pass on look like for them?

Josh:

Those can be sometimes challenging if people haven't thought about it much early on or didn't have kids, never got married.

Josh:

Those are the ones that I think it's a lot of soul searching later on in life and they say, okay, what do I want my money to go do? And so sometimes it's nieces and nephews or family members. From that standpoint, but a lot of it is really cool to see how it flushes out, because I've got clients that do amazing charitable work by donating their time along the way and so you've had power of attorney set up for your healthcare and financial all those things for many years. But then maybe we never talked about 10, 15 years ago when that plan was built out, that you actually want to give your wealth to that charitable organization that you've been donating your time to for all these years. So making sure that that's laid out well and having those conversations because I think that's something that's definitely missed where a lot of advisors just say, oh, just name your niece and nephew, I keep it in the family, or whatever, I'm like no no, no, it's incredible.

Josh:

I usually encourage them too to say you know your legacy could be an endowment of a foundation or you know something that you can pass on to a university where you have a scholarship.

Josh:

I just had that conversation with someone recently that they want to continue to donate to a trade school because their husband was in the trades, and so it's amazing to see that legacy pass on.

Josh:

And you know, it's not always about your name and fame, like some people get joy from seeing their name on things, or you go to a university, their name on their building, et cetera but it really is more about passing on your legacy of I want to help people achieve what I achieved for this university or this charitable cause. I also think, too, a lot of times people forget about their friends and people that have just different career paths, and so a lot of times you'll see that you get back together with friends from high school or college and they're in different circumstances. They may be teachers and don't have a whole lot of money, and so if you've got significant assets you've saved up for your lifetime, you might want to start putting money into a 529 for that person's kids just to help them out, because you love them and you want them to be cared for as well. So there are tons of ways to give back and show your legacy even without having like a traditional family with young kids, etc.

Jessica :

So like you're saying, with friends. I think that that is probably a big overlooked thing. People are like oh, I can donate to this thing that I'm really passionate about, and that's amazing and to keep it going. But I think we have in our minds we're supposed to give our wealth to younger generation. But if you have a community of people that means a lot to you, that have been like your family but is maybe not blood related, they're also places that you can leave your assets to that can continue on and be a legacy for you.

Josh:

It is not talked about enough and I brag on my dad a lot. That's one thing. I was very fortunate to have him. I mean he came from very little means and did really well for himself and created amazing things that never happened to our family's history just financially. So he was able to build that up. But he was always so conscientious of other people and I know when someone would pass away he would just show up with a check and say I know it's probably expensive for the funeral, maybe this could help. I saw that at eight and nine years old and I still remember that. I can tell you what car we were sitting in when I saw my dad give it to him and then just seeing them cry next to the car Cause like I just think again, most people you just think everyone's kind of got it together or whatever it is.

Josh:

But like give while you're. You know living and accumulating wealth is some of the best things you can have. It actually has like psychological effects on you. It helps you. You know, with dopamine and all those different things can flood in just by giving and helping other people and it obviously can be taken advantage of from family members or people who just keep coming back to the well and say, oh, I need, you know, money for a car or whatever. You got to be prudent with who you give to. But being generous is such a huge importance for anybody outside of family, etc. Like I think that's what we're created to do is just help others out. And money is a great tool, but it's got to be used.

Jessica :

Well and I think that's a great example of your family legacy doesn't have to start after you're gone. Generosity while you're living can be a foundation of creating that family legacy, while you're still living, so your kids can see it, so your community can you know, learn from you and see that this person was generous. If I inherit their assets, I also want to be generous with them because they were. Currently, obviously, things are very expensive right now. We're in an inflation period. It's all you hear people talk about, it's all over the news how expensive stuff is right now. These economic trends go up and down all over. Do you feel like this has a substantial role in when you're creating that family legacy and financial legacy? How does that play in?

Josh:

This can be taken in a couple of different ways. I mean, really, I do find that you know, sometimes you meet with a client who's got their assets invested in a certain way but they're not really using the money in their lifetime. They say, josh, you know, we're living on social security, we've got our pensions, we're fine, like we don't really need that money. It's really for the kids. And a lot of times you'll meet them and they're working with someone else and hadn't really dove into those questions before, and you find out I do really want to leave a significant amount of assets to my kids. So you find that they're invested only in 20% stock and so they're not keeping up with inflation because most of their fixed income is just barely keeping up.

Josh:

So a lot of times that can affect how you invest your assets to make sure you can keep up with these costs of living, to have that legacy passed on.

Josh:

The other things are just and it's kind of going back to the question we had before is just, your credit card debt is like 19 to 28% on certain credit cards right now.

Josh:

So if your kids are having medical bills or they can't pay off the debt, you know I've had clients that have paid off those credit card debts but then still had a note in there where their kid are paying them back some interest to reimburse them for it. But that debt can be crippling. I mean, 19% on a debt is just horrible. That compounds a lot of very delicate conversations about, like, when their kids want to buy a house or family member wants to buy a house and they can't afford it, how much do I give to them? How much should I help out versus allow them just to struggle a little bit is kind of a very, very challenging topic right now with how expensive things are. Yeah, Obviously you want to. You know, see your kids thrive or you know family members thrive or friends thrive. But that's a tough one that we take on case by case with clients and seeing how they can pass things or help pass those values on to their family members and pass that legacy.

Jessica :

I want to end with one last question. Have you witnessed over your career being an advisor any cool family legacies or anything that sticks with you when you get to talk to other families about it?

Josh:

Definitely. I laugh because I think back on my first manager after college. He put in his estate plan it was really funny, he's just amazing personality, real fun guy. But he put in his estate plan that he wanted to have a pizza party for his funeral and I thought that was the coolest thing in the world because he loved pizza. I wanted it to be a party, I want it to be like a slideshow and he recorded a video every year and would update it to have that play at his funeral in case he passed away early. So I was like that was so cool to see that you know he actually lived that out.

Josh:

It just depends. Everyone's creative in their own way. I mean, I love the clients that we meet with because people have like Etsy stores they come up with. Some of you are really good writers and they can write handwritten notes to their kids or family members so that they remember stories. Other people are good at typing up things and being more formal with it.

Josh:

Some of my favorite clients have done a video and it doesn't have to be as long extravagant thing but just like on their big birthdays they'll say, okay, I'm going to record a video. Gosh, I'm 40 today. This is what it feels like to be 40 and if they've got kids, they can say some day my kids are gonna be 40 years old, they're gonna watch this video and laugh their heads off because, yeah, I'm probably feeling the same thing that they were and I do wonder. A lot of times I'm like I wish I had uh, known what my dad was like at x age, when he had kids at this age. That would be so fun to see, like if we were going through the same kind of thing.

Jessica :

So so um, but those are just some of the really cool things.

Josh:

But there's a lot of ways you can do it. And if it's really overwhelming for you to think about recording a video or whatever, just do something, because as time goes on, you lose stories, you lose memories. It's a sad thing to realize, but a hundred years from now, most likely no one will know who we are. But it's the stories we leave behind and the legacy you leave with your family and relationships, and that's so important. So I think documenting some things like that just a short video or handwritten notes are so valuable.

Josh:

We were just walking back through some of my grandfather's letters from World War II, back to his wife and like just seeing his handwriting and reading just these simple little things and just seeing how much he loved her, like that was so impactful for us to read, it's just really cool. But like that's not really happening right now, like we just are losing a lot of that connection and those memories that we're going to have. So think about things that would be really cool that you could have had from your parents and do that now so that the next generation or you know other relationships will be able to look back and see those. It's really, really cool to see.

Jessica :

And there's so many softwares and companies and things right now that, if you just look it up, there's emails that can go out weekly that family members can respond to and they get made into a book and it's a story of their life. There's companies, like you were saying, that you can record a video and telling your stories. I think you had mentioned to me one about a photo album and looking through and recording a voice memo kind of thing of what was going on in this picture to leave behind for kids and family members and stuff like that, which is always so heartfelt. I think all of us can relate to loving to seek these people that are in our life when they were our age, when they were young and before we were around. Well, thank you again so much for talking with us about it. I know this is one of your favorite topics and it's also one of mine. It's so fun to get to talk about something that feels bigger than just finances, even though it does play a huge part. It's much more than that.

Jessica :

I really love getting to talk about this and, for our listeners, if you have not thought about family legacy planning or just what you want your legacy to be going forward. I would encourage you to meet with one of our advisors at Summit. Like I mentioned, we have a really cool process that our advisors do that can really help you narrow down and start thinking about the things that you want for your future and what you would want your assets to go to and life to look like down the road. I hope you got a lot out of this. I sure did.

Jessica :

If you want to connect with any of our advisors, our website is www. summitwealthgroup. com and we are @Summit Wealth Group on all of the social media platforms. Thanks for listening. See you next week. Thanks for listening to the Reach, your Summit podcast, brought to you by Summit Wealth Group. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with others and subscribe so you don't miss an episode. If you have any questions or topics that you'd like us to cover, please email us at info@ summitwealthgroup. com.

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