Transcript
Intro
Stephan Shipe: This week, we begin by examining why some publicly traded companies compensate employees with stock rather than cash, and how equity-based compensation changes incentives, liquidity, and risk for both the company and the employee. Next, we discuss the tax realities of inheriting a large traditional IRA under the 10-year distribution rule, including how beneficiaries can think about timing withdrawals and managing tax bracket compression. And finally, we’re joined by Susan Brody, founder of Family Legacies, for a conversation on how families can preserve personal history, values, and stories across generations through thoughtful legacy documentation. So let’s go ahead and get started with question number one.
Question 1 – Why Do Companies Compensate Employees With Stock Instead of Cash?
Stephan Shipe: “The publicly traded company I work for will likely move to providing a small percentage of compensation to position employees as a stock transfer or gift, not options. What is the benefit to the company in moving to this model? They are unlikely to divide the stock, which means they will need to buy back some stock in order to turn around and gift it to employees. How does it benefit a company to provide stock versus cash compensation? I can see how it would be a benefit to reduce the cash outlay, but I’m confused by the logistics of the company having to use cash to buy their own stock back, as it seems to use up cash either way.”
A lot going on in this one. I think there’s a few things we got to clarify first before we jump into how this works out. Let’s first tackle the cash versus stock conversation first from a company and an employee perspective. So generally, at a certain point, companies stop providing salary. It can be for key employees. It can be for managers of a company. The goal is to align incentives. So it’s common where somebody starts working for a company, they’re paid in cash. And then eventually it’s cash plus a bonus. And then above that, you typically see a mix of cash, bonus, and incentive compensation. That incentive compensation, usually through stock or equity compensation, is going to be either RSUs, restricted stock, or you can deal with options. Slight difference there. The restricted stock or the direct stock grants are just going to be stock that hits your portfolio. So it’s going to be yours. Most of the time it’s restricted in some way. So it has some vesting time period. Again, the goal is to keep you there. So if they’re offering you some sort of stock and some sort of incentive, they want to make sure you have that equity mindset. They want you to be an owner and the best way to have employees act like owners is to make sure they’re paid as owners, right? So the better the company does, the higher that stock value. And that works a lot better than salary compensation. This is why you see situations where you’ll have major management of companies, CEOs, CFOs, and they’ll have massive compensation packages. Somebody says, that’s crazy. They’re making $30 million a year, $100 million a year. But when you actually look at how they’re compensated, the cash compensation is usually zero or maybe $200,000. And the rest of it is all stock, whether it’s through options that were granted or stock that was granted because they hit certain milestones. So companies love to do this because it aligns incentives. It makes it a lot more complicated on the employee and actually locks up the employee from being able to easily move to a different job because a lot of those incentives keep them there. Say, well, if I leave, I don’t get this $300,000 of incentive pay that I was going to get next year, or I won’t get access to my options, they won’t vest or anything along that. So there’s a lot of reasons why a company would do that.
Now, to your point, the issue is why they would go out and not just pay the cash if they have to go buy the stock anyways. And that’s not necessarily true. The company is not going out and buying the stock off of the market and then giving it to you. What normally happens is they will dilute the shares. Now that doesn’t mean they’re going to split the shares. And that’s where I think there might be some misunderstanding on the question of thinking that a stock split is different or the same as dilution. A stock split — nothing actually happens to the ownership structure. If I have one stock at $100 and I split it in two, and now I have two stocks at $50, I still own $100 worth of this company. The only difference is it’s a little bit more liquid because I only have to sell stocks for $50 as opposed to $100. Generally that happens when stocks get outside of this kind of golden range of $30 to $70, which makes it more attainable to retail investors. So that’s when stock splits happen. Dilution means what’s going to happen is there were 100 shares outstanding. They want to give you an extra five shares of stock as an incentive. So now the whole pie is split into 105 pieces as opposed to 100 pieces. So there’s absolutely dilutive behavior in what they’re doing. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Generally, that’s kind of built into these equity compensation structures. It’s good for the company to have that. So that’s how that works.
Now, if they did own their shares ahead of time, that would be called treasury stock, where the company did go buy their own stock on the open market, and they could give it to you. To be very clear, this is not a gift. This is absolutely compensation. And if you’re given shares, like you’re discussing here, you’d have to pay tax on those shares as they’re given to you. So restricted stock is typically taxed when it’s received or when it’s granted. So I wouldn’t be surprised though, if they give you shares, it’s rare for them to give shares without some sort of vesting structure in place. Because the whole idea is you’d like to lock up your employees for a certain amount of time. If I’m the company and I’m looking at you and saying, you’re doing great for the company and I’m worried you’re going to leave at a certain point, I just say, well, I’m going to give you stock that vests over five years. So that way, if you leave, you miss out on all of that. And the advantage to you is I’m likely going to pay you more, but it’s going to be through these other avenues besides just cash. So it’s just give and take. You’re going to make more money on the stock side, but you’re going to have to stay to get it. So that’s where this dynamic starts to commence.
That puts in a lot of risk for you on the concentration side, the liquidity side. It doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a large portion of the compensation. So that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but just know if that continues, that’s helping out the company because it’s less cash they have to outlay, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But it adds a concentration in the company for you where now your cash flow for work and also your investments are tied to the same company. And generally we like to keep that human capital risk separate from the investment risk. So that way they start to diversify each other.
Another fun fact related to that — if you were the company, and you’re publicly traded, so there’s a good market for your company. And I’m not saying this is the case, but this is a common situation that comes up. You’re looking at your stock price and saying, our stock price is really high right now. Then you say, well, should we spend cash to pay our employees or should we go and give them stock of the shares that we think are inflated right now? Then it makes a lot of sense for them to give out shares of inflated values. When the shares drop significantly in price and they look at it and say, we think our shares are so cheap — that’s when you see companies repurchase their own shares to add to that treasury stock. Again, that’s not always the case. There’s a lot of situations where companies give equity incentives regardless of what the stock price actually is. But definitely something to keep in mind since you’re asking about the company dynamic and the employee dynamic there — that stock price absolutely matters and everyone has an opinion of what they think is a fair value for that stock.
Question 2 – Managing the Tax Burden of a Large Inherited IRA Under the 10-Year Rule
Stephan Shipe: “My father passed away last year and left me $3.2 million in a traditional IRA. I’m 47, in a high tax bracket, and I’ve been told I have to take distributions over 10 years. That feels like a tax disaster. Is there anything I can do to manage this, or is the tax hit just unavoidable?”
You are correct that this is a tax disaster and you’re paying the taxes. Somebody’s paying the taxes. That’s what it comes down to. It was going to be either your father or you. I know it’s a hard situation to be in. And this is something that happens much more often than I wish it did because this could potentially have been avoided with just some really good planning earlier on with your father. And the reason for that is a lot of times, parents don’t go and start thinking about, kind of beyond their lifetime, what the tax brackets could be for not only for them, but for their kids. And that’s usually where they get into this like, well, I don’t want to talk to my kids about how much money they make. So I don’t want to know what tax bracket they’re in. But your question is exactly the reason why I typically point to my clients and say, you need to know kind of where your kids are. Because it may make sense for you to not pay the tax if you only look in a vacuum at your personal finances. But if you could go do Roth conversions at a 22% bracket, it’s either you’re going to pay at a 22% bracket, which may not be ideal or maybe a wash for you. When you pass it on to your kids, they may be in a 35% bracket. So it would have made a lot of sense for family money. This is how you start really thinking about money as multigenerational or kind of moving from one family to another as opposed to just for one lifetime. And unfortunately, your situation is what happens without this. Or hopefully on the better side, your father was in a really high tax bracket and it was going to be a wash anyways.
So there’s a few things we can do here. Unfortunately, the broad or the quick answer to this is you’re paying the tax, and that’s absolutely true. The 10-year rule was meant to compress this so that way upon death or receiving an inherited IRA, you’re going to have to pay tax on that IRA sometime within the next 10 years. In other words, you have 10 years to pull that money out of that account. So generally, you do that through smoothing those distributions a little bit at a time and starting to generally divide by 10 and split it up. There’s some controversy on that or some different opinions on how you can take those out. But you can definitely coordinate withdrawals with income changes.
The problem you’re going to have is depending on how much wealth you have in your other accounts, $3.2 million may not be enough for you to be able to retire and take no income. Maybe you go take a sabbatical for a few years. You could do that as well. You go take a break from working for four or five years, take the money out of the IRA during that time and could try to smooth it out. But the reality is that $3.2 million, even over 10 years, at best no growth, you’re looking at over $300,000 in income from the IRA. And I know I’m preaching to the choir because you are well aware of that being an issue that you’re going to be having to contend with. But there are some options that we can start to slow some of the pain, but we’re not going to be able to eliminate all of it. Right? Obviously the main answer is always, well, of course there’s charitable giving and charitable strategies. You can offset some of that. Of course, if you’re wanting to keep as much money as possible though, then you start looking at strategic withdrawals. So if the markets are down significantly, great time to pull money out of the account. And the reason I say that is imagine your $3.2 million, market crashes tomorrow and now it’s $2 million. Then if you were to take that income out, you could go put that in a brokerage account at $2 million. Market recovers, it’s back up to $4 million, and you only paid tax on the $2 million as opposed to the $3.2 million. So that’s going to be important.
Income drops for one year or income shifting, depending on where your income’s coming from now, could you push more income to another year through like a deferred comp plan or something like that so that way you could take some of this IRA income. But then you have basic tax location strategies, which we’ve talked about before, which is if you have any bond allocation, which at 47 you likely do have some bond allocation or some fixed income allocation in your portfolio, how much of that can you move over into this inherited IRA to slow the growth of the IRA? Because you’re concerned about $3.2 million in an IRA, that’s a lot that you’re going to have to pay tax on. The bad news is money should double every 10 years on a rough rule of 72, which means you’re probably looking at really four to five million, assuming you’re still taking out some distributions from this, over the next 10 years of actual IRA distributions that you’ll be taking out over the next 10 years at best. So there’s a lot more tax in there. So if you can put fixed income in that portfolio, that would help slow it down, offset that with more equity allocations in something like a brokerage account or any of your other accounts that you have. So unfortunately, no secret rule that’s out there to get you from paying the taxes. The 10-year rule can be really rough. And that’s a good explanation or a good reason for why I think people need to think about this. And you would be thinking about this too, right? If you have kids or anything, how the next generation is going to handle those tax situations as well.
From the Field – Preserving Family Legacy Through Documentary Film
Stephan Shipe: In our From the Field segment, we explore how intentional legacy documentation can play an important role alongside financial planning. We’re joined by Susan Brody, founder and president of Family Legacies. For more than 26 years, Susan has worked closely with families to preserve their life stories, values, and lessons through documentary-style legacy films.
Welcome to the Scholar Wealth Podcast. To kick us off, tell us a little bit about how you got into this world, and we’ll go from there.
Susan Brody: Okay, thank you, Stephan. It’s nice to be with you today. My passion for preserving stories really started when I was a kid. I grew up in Montreal, which is a very multicultural and multilingual city, listening to the stories of people from all over the world, from immigrants, war veterans, Holocaust survivors. They were my teachers and my neighbors. And those stories were stories of resilience, stories of success, stories of struggle and they had a profound effect on me. But my career took me in a different direction first. After college, I became the entertainment director for Club Med Resorts, living in three different countries. And then I used my hospitality experience from that to found and run and eventually sell Colorado’s top convention and event planning company called Convention Designs, which is still around.
But after I sold the company, I felt this tug to reconnect with my passion for people’s stories. And in trying to figure out the best way to do that, I came up with the idea that the younger generations really relate to film and podcasts now, much more than the written word. And so I decided to start a film production company exclusively dedicated to preserving family legacies and stories on film. So I started to research it and I couldn’t find anybody in the world who was doing anything like that. So I thought, okay, I’ll pioneer a new industry, but I had to learn the craft first. So I went back to graduate school and studied film. And in the year 2000, I founded Family Legacies.
Over time, we started to be invited to work with families of more and more significant means. And what I learned very early on was that a significant amount of attention was put on preserving financial capital, but there was really no structure or format to preserve human capital. And what I also learned is that when families sit down to preserve their stories and their legacy on film, it becomes so much more than an archive. It becomes a bridge that connects generations and a catalyst that’s really important for conversations that have never been had before between family members. And it becomes a really powerful tool for effective succession and stewardship. So that’s when I realized that my work was becoming a structure or an architecture for preserving legacy and human capital on film. And it’s this structure that really is an important part of successful succession within families of means. That’s why I got into it.
Stephan Shipe: And I have so many questions for you on all of this because it’s such an interesting area. And what I think is very unique compared to lots of different ways to pass on legacy, as you mentioned the financial means and all of this, but the quality of the product and the product of the stories, or the quality of the film, but also the types of stories you’re able to draw out in these documentaries are really unique. How do you go from somebody saying they want to pass on a legacy, this human capital and these conversations, and then you put them in a chair with the lights on and they’ve got the film crew and everybody’s there. How do you make that conversation comfortable? Because a lot of times you think back to these great stories and the great values that are passed on, they’re not scripted, right? They’re very comfortable. They’re at the dinner table or they’re on vacation. You’re hearing these stories for the first time. How do you draw out those stories? And I guess the second part of that is how do you make them comfortable or even know what stories to bring to the table, so to speak?
Susan Brody: That’s a really good question. So we have a whole process dedicated to that that we call our pre-interview process, which you in the financial world might call discovery, right? Your discovery process. So we really get to know our clients way before the film date and they get to know us because we have to develop trust, right? So you’re not going to just open up to anybody. So we develop a relationship. In our pre-interview process, we lead them through what we call a life review. So we help them figure out and articulate the most powerful stories that they have to share. We help them figure out the most powerful life lessons that they want to pass down to future generations. We have a section of our film that we call different things depending on the family, sometimes an ethical will or family vision statement or a softer approach, words of wisdom for future generations. And so we help them figure out what they want to say in those things. Perhaps there’s an expectation that goes along with inheritance. Perhaps they decided to make one child the trustee of their estate and explaining why they chose that particular person or one of their children or somebody else can prevent a lot of fights afterwards among siblings.
So we help them figure all that out in advance. So that pre-interview process serves many purposes. One, it helps us know what questions to ask, because once we bring in the film crew and the hairstylist and the makeup artist, we want to use that time efficiently. And so we know what questions to ask, so they’re totally relevant to their lives. It helps us develop the script. And it serves as a fantastic dress rehearsal for our clients. So they are already feeling fairly comfortable by the time we bring in the film crew and by the time of our film date. And then we film generally in a place that they’re comfortable in, their home, sometimes in an office if the focus is more on the business, and we get them relaxed right from the beginning. So while our film crew is setting up, our hairstylists and makeup artists are pampering them, chatting with them, getting them comfortable. And then we say, kind of exactly what you told me at the beginning of this podcast, that it’s all going to be edited, you can stop, you can start, you can say cut at any time. And if we feel like they could say something more powerfully, we might do the same thing, stop it and make some suggestions. So it’s a really fun process. Our clients say they love the pre-interview process because it takes them on a trip down memory lane. Many of our clients, this is not the intent, but many of our clients say that it’s better than any therapy because they’re reliving their lives and they’re making sense of it in terms of the legacy they want to leave. And they’re seeing that they’re part of a whole story and an arc and that they have wisdom to share for future generations. So we make sure that they’re very, very comfortable. And we find that even though we’ve got the lights and the cameras and sometimes whole families, we find that it just ends up being a conversation. And within 10 minutes, people forget they’re even on camera. So they get lost in their stories.
What the Generations Want to Say — and Hear
Stephan Shipe: And how do you, when you do the pre-interview process, is there a difference between what one generation wants to say and what the next generation wants to hear from a topics perspective? So is the pre-interview only for the parents to say, this is what I want my kids to know, and is there an opportunity for the kids to say, you know, what I’ve always wondered is X.
Susan Brody: You are right on the spot because we, whether we’re filming a whole family together or let’s say we’re just filming the patriarch or the matriarch of the family, we will still pre-interview their kids and any other relatives that they introduce us to because the kids will tell us, you know, I’ve always wondered about, sometimes it’s about a motivation for why their parents did something. Or I want to make sure that this story from my childhood is preserved because it was such a fond memory and I want my kids to know about this story. And sometimes when we’re filming whole families, it’s not just an interview. We create, it’s a real professional documentary. So we have a lot of B-roll. So we create scenes. So for example, we did a scene, one particular family we filmed in La Jolla, California, we filmed a huge extended family, the matriarch, patriarch, their kids, their kids’ spouses, and all the grandkids. So we created several scenes and they’re based on things that the families like to do together. So this particular family had a tradition that when the original nuclear family got together, so that’s like the matriarch and patriarch and their four adult kids, one of the things they always did was cook breakfast together.
So we created a scene in the kitchen with eggs flying, turned into competitions between the siblings of how many eggs they could crack with one hand, lots of jokes, but we prepared the kids for this, not their parents, the adult kids, but not their parents. And we told the kids to tell their parents what they most wanted their children to know about grandma and grandpa. So it was really touching because of what the kids said. I mean, I remember one of the sons said, you know, whenever I have a hard decision to make, I think about your advice, Dad, to live my life as if my actions are going to be on the front page of the New York Times. And what happened was, in addition to all the humor and the flour and the eggs flying all over the kitchen, there was a lot of emotion because the grandparents had never heard this before. And so it resulted in the grandparents realizing that the lessons they had hoped to pass down to their kids were really absorbed. And even more importantly, they learned that they were appreciated and admired by their kids from all the things they said. So it was kind of a sneaky way of asking the question, what makes you most proud of your parents?
So these are conversations because we’re all busy, especially, you know, successful families are really busy, very busy lives, and they don’t often talk about these things. So sometimes there’s a lot of healing that happens in these conversations too. So it’s very rewarding.
What Families Wish They Had Talked About Sooner
Stephan Shipe: As a follow up to that, on the kind of conversations that may not have had, when you’re going through this, because you’ve created hundreds of these documentaries and there’s many moving parts, as you mentioned, not just an interview that’s happening throughout the whole process. But is there any themes of what families wish they had talked about sooner or topics that different members of the family kind of always bring up of, don’t worry, we’re going to hit that because it gets brought up every single time.
Susan Brody: Yeah, that’s a really good question because there’s a lot that people talk about in the film that they realized would have benefited them had they talked about sooner, but you know, rather better now than never, right? So yeah, and the things that I think most families wish they had talked about sooner or that they talk about in the film that they never talked about before are things like the hard chapters, right? Struggles, failures, things like all the failures that happened before they became successful. And that becomes really powerful in a film because in successful families, sometimes the kids see their parents as larger than life or setting a standard that might be unattainable for them. And when the failures are talked about, they become more human and more relatable to their own children. And a lot of healing happens.
You know, there was a family that we worked with that was really interesting. They were a family from the province of Gujarat in India. It’s a farming community and they grew up in a two room home with buffalo dung floors, one room for the humans and one room for the animals. And by the time we filmed this family, their lives were a little different. They were living in the United States. Their kids owned a global hotel management company. They had multiple homes and a private jet. And the rags to riches story was just fascinating. But one thing that we had them talk about that had never been talked about before, and I didn’t really realize the impact until after the film was complete, but I asked just a very simple question to the matriarch and patriarch who, despite their new lives, had kept the family traditions. Like, Gen 3, all their marriages were still arranged. They lived with their eldest son and his family. So I asked the matriarch and patriarch what they admired most about their daughter-in-law. And without hesitation, they started to talk about how she had enriched their lives, how she always made their favorite foods with all the spices from home, how she researched to find the best medical care for them, scheduled all their doctor’s appointments, how she always made them feel included and respected. And then the matriarch said, you know, we don’t consider her to be our daughter-in-law, we consider her to be our daughter. Well, after the film was complete and the daughter-in-law watched it, because she wasn’t there for the production, she called me in tears saying, you have no idea what this film has done for our whole household. She said, in our culture, we don’t often express feelings and emotions. And I had no idea that my in-laws even noticed the things I was doing for them, let alone that they appreciated me. And it’s changed the whole atmosphere in our home.
Probably in my mind, the number one thing that people don’t talk about is appreciation for each other. And that’s the thing that we try to bring out, the foremost thing that we try to bring out in our film because it can heal all kinds of relationships. You know, talking about the hard things, we often tend to focus on our successes and our achievements and the good things in life. So sometimes talking about those hard things really make a difference. Other things that we get people to talk about that they often never have talked about before is their fears and their greatest regrets in life and their hopes and dreams for their kids and grandkids. I guess the number one thing that people wish they had talked about sooner is to more explicitly express their love and appreciation for their family members.
The Responsibility of Shaping the Story
Stephan Shipe: How much responsibility do you feel when you’re building these documentaries to make sure that story comes across? Because I imagine that you’re pulling so much information, so many different types of interviews that you have a unique position where you’re seeing the connections that maybe the family themselves have never seen. So when you’re building up that story and you’re deciding what to cut and what to keep and how that goes in, I imagine that that’s a big weight, right? How does that play into your role?
Susan Brody: It’s huge. It’s huge. I do feel a responsibility for that. And we’ve actually been given that directive to take that responsibility from some clients. For example, we worked with this, it’s a very well-known family. I won’t mention their names, out of respect for their privacy, a well-known business family. And their family office engaged us to preserve the legacies of three different branches of the family. So the family business was created actually seven generations ago and was still very successful, because of the efforts to keep the family close and together and because of all the meetings and regular family reunions and things like that. So the origin story remained very much alive. So the instructions that we were given from the family office was to use the film to create bonds and connection between the generations. So instead of asking questions, we filmed generation five, six, and seven together in each of the branches. We directed conversation between the family members, which is a technique we often use when we have whole extended families. And then occasionally we’ll jump in with a follow-up question if it’s pertinent and nobody asked it in the conversation.
So in this family, the older generation talked about the origins of the family, how they came to the United States in the 1700s, the origins of the family business. The second generation, middle generation talked about how they picked up the torch in the family business or how they forged their own paths completely separate from the family business. And then the younger generation mostly asked questions to help them start to formulate what their role in the family would be. And they shared personal challenges too, which we knew about in advance from all the pre-interviews, so we directed that. But one of the personal challenges that they shared was the challenge of having such a recognizable family name and level of wealth and wondering whether friends and romantic partners liked them for who they were or because of their last name. And it was beautiful to watch the older generations respond with such empathy and guidance because they too had to deal with those challenges. And they talked about a lot of threads that we directed, of course, because we knew in advance what to get them to talking about. They talked about the thread that has stayed with the family through seven generations, that with great wealth comes great responsibility to contribute to society. And they wanted to make sure that value was passed down through the generations. So that inspired a lot of discussions, because the younger generations had their own idea of how they wanted to incorporate philanthropy into their lives. And then the other thing that really kept this family together was the value of hard work, the ethic of hard work. Because aside from the family members that were continuing to work in the family business, many of these family members didn’t need to work for many generations, but they all did. I believe it’s because the story, the origin story of the family business was still very much alive. And so it was very emotional, a lot of tears, a lot of love. And there were three powerful films. And then we were also charged with creating a fourth film that combined the highlights of each of the three films for that family.
Stephan Shipe: Yeah, that’s neat to see the combination of multiple generations.
Susan Brody: Another fun thing we did recently this past summer is we filmed at a lake house in Michigan where three generations of the family had spent all their summers. And so we spent a day filming the stories and the interviews. And then we spent the next day filming with drones and GoPro cams. We filmed water skiing, catching turtles, bird watching, and all the activities they did on the lake and incorporated that in the film because it was a family that really had a focus of working hard together and playing hard together. So we really had the whole process so much fun. And families tell us it’s the best times they’ve had together as a family, is doing this. We had one family that we filmed the whole extended family and some of the teenagers were kind of resentful because we were filming this on vacation, right?
And we were taking time out of their vacation to do this film. But when they arrived at the house and the girls saw the makeup artist and the hairstylist, they said, okay, maybe this is going to be fun. And at the end, they said this was the best day of their vacation, because they learned so much about their grandparents that they didn’t know. And that’s the interesting thing, even for families that feel like they know their parents and grandparents so well, they’re always amazed at the end that they learned things they didn’t know.
Stephan Shipe: That’s wonderful. I think it’s very clear that the storytelling aspect has a monumental impact both on the creation side and afterwards for everyone. As we wrap up today, is there anything that you’d want to share with listeners who are thinking about this or some pro tips, so to speak, if you’ve done this and you know it’s happening that you’d like to share with them as they’re thinking about passing on something more than just the financial capital of their lives.
Susan Brody: Yeah, well, I founded this company based on an African saying, actually, and it says that when an elder dies, it’s as if an entire library is burned down. And studies show that when not properly preserved, a whole human library of stories and experiences and wisdom and life lessons is completely gone in just three generations. So in my mind, that’s a crime now that we have the technology to preserve all of that. And a thing that I have learned is that when financial capital is passed down without narrative and without meaning, it can fracture a family. But when it’s passed down with meaning and with the stories and with all of the narrative, it can unify a family. And so I think that is so important because the context really matters.
And I’d like to add that the best time to preserve your legacy is not necessarily at the end of your life. It’s when you’re still active and articulate in the middle of things and there’s still room for growth and healing and change within families. That’s the best time to do it. And we have many families that we do sequels for every five years. So we find people are doing this younger and younger because they want to be remembered when they’re still busy and articulate. And it’s just a way of connecting generations. And I guess I just want to dispel one myth that I hear sometimes from clients. And that is that producing a legacy film is not a vanity project. It’s a way of sharing your wisdom, your life lessons with your family, even family members not yet born. So you can mentor and educate and comfort and inspire and heal and entertain your family even beyond your lifetime. So not only is it beneficial for your kids and grandkids and future generations of your family, but it gives the older generations a purpose beyond their working years. And it’s a way to become a mentor in perpetuity.
So I think everybody should do this. I’ve learned that there’s no such thing as an ordinary person. Because if you’ve lived a while, you have wisdom, you have experiences to share, and you have stories to tell that will really help guide rising generations and make them feel like they’re not just individuals standing alone. They’re part of an arc of a whole family and part of something larger than themselves. So it’s a wonderful thing.
Stephan Shipe: Very well said. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Susan Brody: Thank you so much, Stephan. I enjoyed it.
Outro
Stephan Shipe: And that’s our show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week!
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