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© Penelope Lemov and Parenting Grown Children, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given.

recent posts

© Penelope Lemov and Parenting Grown Children, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given.

Category: leaving a legacy

  • Leaving a Legacy: Clear out the stuff your kids won’t want

      This is a post I wrote several years ago. It's my simple guide to right-sizing or downsizing or just cleaning and clearing out closets that are jammed too full of stuff.  My motivation for clearing my closets (and attic storage) was a move from a house to an apartment. But another incentive was in…

  • Money Matters: When our heirs get ahead of themselves (and us).

    We have an elderly cousin. He never married and lives alone in a Park Avenue apartment where the walls are lined with old paintings that may or may not be worth a small fortune. His closest relatives (besides us and some second cousins) are two nephews. One of them has struggled financially, and our cousin…

  • Leaving a Legacy: Passing on the passwords and other digital conundrums

    Pity our poor adult children. When they meet the love of their life and decide to commit to each other, they face an ordeal we didn't: Whether to and how to merge digital accounts. If newlyweds decide to save money by using one Spotify account–rather than each having his/her own–will Spotify's algorithms let one person's…

  • Leaving a Legacy: What about those digital assets?

    We don't like to think about what life will be like when we're no longer here and whether our grown children will act like adults when divvying up our worldly goods. We may assume we've taken care of that by having an estate plan that sets down rules and guidelines for sharing our legacy. But…

  • Leaving a Legacy: Is there a fair way to divide our assets?

    The two most boring words in a parent's vocabulary: Estate Planning. Within that world, the most volatile words are Unequal Shares.  Whether we have a gargantuan billion-dollar estate to divvy up among our children or just a small savings account to apportion (or somewhere between those two extremes), we may have reasons to deviate from…

  • Legacy Planning: How to apportion the non-monetary stuff

    Our treasured goods may be stuffed in boxes under our beds, sitting in clear view on our coffee tables or hanging prominently on our walls. Aside from whether or not our kids will want the stuff, the question is how to apportion the bits and pieces that we've accumulated over our lifetimes and, for some…

  • Leaving a Legacy: A push to get our storytelling act together

    I have been working on a memoir for several years–writing sections, taking breaks, losing heart, returning to the work.  Anyone who's tried crafting anything personal knows what I'm talking about: So easy to lose confidence and stall out. The memoir is about my career–a legacy for my grandkids so they can know the times and…

  • Leaving a Legacy: Is there ever a good reason for your Will to favor one child over another?

    Here's a loaded question: Is it ever right or fair to leave your children unequal portions of your earthly gains and goods. I've looked at this issue in previous posts. Mostly I've talked about situations where one child has done particularly well financially while the other, having devoted themselves to socially important but unremunerative work,…

  • Gifts to a Grown Child’s Loved One: Can we take them back when they leave the family?

    In the best of all possible worlds, we give our children gifts freely. We attach no strings–unless there's good cause and that, of course, is not the best of all possible worlds. We may be willing to loan/gift our child money to help them keep up on mortgage payments or add an addition to the…

  • Grown Children, Us and Covid-19: Updating Advanced Directives

                                                 Romare Bearden Tomorrow I May Be Far Away I am no longer a New Yorker but, in this time of coronavirus, I am a regular viewer of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's daily press briefings. When he reports those stress-inducing intubation statistics, he reminds…