I have never been comfortable talking about money with my adult children, but my wife and I are making some changes to our estate plan. Our question: Should we talk with our children about their inheritance? Have you tackled this issue?
You certainly can make an argument for not having this conversation. Some parents, for instance, worry that if their children learn what they’re going to inherit too early, they could get lazy or, perhaps worse, complain about how assets are being carved up.
That said, lawyers and financial planners have told us that discussing your estate plan with your children can yield one big benefit: the chance to gauge their reactions. Even if you don’t change your plans based on their concerns, your children should have a chance to work through their issues while you’re alive, meaning there’s less chance of quarreling once you’re gone.
To be more specific: First, tell each child separately that you’re trying to decide what to do and that you want to find out what he or she expects or wants. Once you have that information, you can figure out where the potential conflicts, if any, are. (Did you help pay for one, and only one, child’s graduate degree? And are his or her siblings keeping score?) A discussion that turns up differing expectations could give you the chance to go back to the drawing board now, rather than having your children fight over your plans in the future.
However uncomfortable the thought of discussing such topics makes you, don’t mislead your children. As one financial planner cautioned us, even adult children who inherit more than they expected sometimes get angry. They may remember times when they really could have used a helping hand from their parents, and now they know their parents had the ability to help them and chose not to. It’s even worse when parents assure children that they will be “taken care of” and then bequeath much less than their children anticipated.
Larry Smith: Leave a good job
The conventional wisdom of finding a “good” job might be a very risky move. Respected and thought-provoking Waterloo Economics professor, Larry Smith (MA ’75), is on a mission to help us avoid good jobs so we can find a great one. In his book “No Fears, No Excuses: What You Need to Do to Have a Great Career” he itemizes all the excuses and worries that can hold us back — and deconstructs them brilliantly to inspire all readers to pursue their passion.
Hey there,
I’ll never forget launching my first open-source project and sharing it on Reddit…
I had spent a couple of days at my parents’ place over Christmas that year and decided to use some of my spare time to work on a Python library I christened Schedule.
The idea behind Schedule was very simple and had a narrow focus (I find that that that’s always a good idea for libraries by the way):
Developers would use it like a timer to periodically call a function inside their Python programs.
The kicker was that Schedule used a funky “natural sounding” syntax to specify the timer interval. For example, if you wanted to run a function every 10 minutes you’d do this:
schedule.every(10).minutes.do(myfunc) Or, if you wanted to run a particular task every day at 10:30 in the morning, you’d do this:
schedule.every().day.at('10:30').do(mytask) Because I was so frustrated with Cron’s syntax I thought this approach was really cool. And so I decided this would be the first Python module I’d release as open-source.
I cleaned up the code and spent some time coming up with a nice README file—because that’s really the first thing that your potential users will see when they check out your library.
Once I had my module available on PyPI and the source code on GitHub I decided to call some attention to the project. The same night I posted a link to the repository to Reddit and a couple of other sites.
I still remember that I had shaky hands when I clicked the “submit” button…
It’s scary to put your work out there for the whole world to judge! Also, I didn’t know what to expect.
Would people call me stupid for writing a “simple” library like that?
Would they think my code wasn’t good enough?
Would they find all kinds of bugs and publicly shame me for them? I felt almost a physical sense of dread about pushing the “submit” button on Reddit that night!
The next morning I woke up and immediately checked my email. Were there any comments? Yes, about twenty or so!
I started reading through all of them, faster and faster—
And of course my still frightful mind immediately zoomed in on the negative ones, like
“Cool idea, but not particularly useful”,
and
“The documentation is not enough”,
and
“Not a big fan of the pseudo-english syntax. Way too clever and gimmicky.”
At this point I was starting to feel a *little* discouraged… This was just something I wrote in a couple of hours and gave away for free!
The comment that really made my stomach churn was one from a particularly well known member of the Python community:
“And another library with global state 🙁 … Such an API should not even exist. It sets a bad example.”
Ouch, that hurt. I really looked up to that person and had used some of their libraries in other projects…
It was almost like my worst fears were now playing out in front of me!
I’d never be able to get another job as a Python developer after this…
At the time I didn’t see the positive and supportive comments in that discussion thread. I didn’t see the almost 70 upvotes. I didn’t see the valuable lessons hidden in the seemingly rude comments. I dwelled on the negative and felt terrible and depressed that whole day.
So how do you think this story ends?
Did I delete the Schedule repo, switched careers and never looked at Reddit again?
Wrong!
Schedule now has almost 3,000 stars on GitHub and is among the top 70 Python repositories (out of more than 215,000). When PyPI’s download statistics were still working I saw that it got several thousand downloads per month. I get emails every week from people asking questions about it or thanking me for writing it…
Isn’t that crazy!? How’s that possible after all of these disheartening comments?
My answer is “I don’t know”—and I also don’t think that Schedule is a particularly great library that deserves all this attention, by the way.
But, it seems to solve a problem for some people. It also seems to have a polarizing effect on developers who see it—some love it, some hate it.
Today I’m glad I shipped Schedule that night.
Glad because it was helpful to so many people over the years and glad because it helped me develop a thicker skin when it comes to sharing and launching things publicly.
I’m writing you this meandering email because not very long ago I found this comment buried in my Reddit message history:
~~~
As someone who has posted a number of projects and blog posts in r/Python, just wanted to drop you a line and encourage that you don’t let the comments in your thread get you down. You see all those upvotes? Those are people that like your library, but don’t really have a comment to make in the thread proper. My biggest issue with /r/Python is that it tends towards cynicism and sometimes cruelty rather than encouragement and constructive criticism.
Keep up the great work,
Rob
~~~
Wow! What a positive and encouraging comment!
Back when I felt discouraged by all of these negative comments I must’ve missed it. But reading it a few years later made me re-live that whole situation and it showed me how much I’d grown as a developer and as a person in the meantime.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, maybe feeling bogged down by the developer community who can be unfiltered and pretty rude sometimes, don’t get discouraged.
Even if some people don’t like what you did there can be thousands who love your work.
It’s a big pond, and sometimes the best ideas are polarizing.
The only way to find out is to ship, ship, ship.
Happy Pythoning!
— Dan Bader (RealPython.com)
Time for G.O.P. to Threaten to Fire Trump
Republican leaders need to mount an intervention.
Up to now I have not favored removing President Trump from office. I felt strongly that it would be best for the country that he leave the way he came in, through the ballot box. But last week was a watershed moment for me, and I think for many Americans, including some Republicans.
It was the moment when you had to ask whether we really can survive two more years of Trump as president, whether this man and his demented behavior — which will get only worse as the Mueller investigation concludes — are going to destabilize our country, our markets, our key institutions and, by extension, the world. And therefore his removal from office now has to be on the table.
I believe that the only responsible choice for the Republican Party today is an intervention with the president that makes clear that if there is not a radical change in how he conducts himself — and I think that is unlikely — the party’s leadership will have no choice but to press for his resignation or join calls for his impeachment.
It has to start with Republicans, given both the numbers needed in the Senate and political reality. Removing this president has to be an act of national unity as much as possible — otherwise it will tear the country apart even more. I know that such an action is very difficult for today’s G.O.P., but the time is long past for it to rise to confront this crisis of American leadership.
Trump’s behavior has become so erratic, his lying so persistent, his willingness to fulfill the basic functions of the presidency — like
- reading briefing books,
- consulting government experts before making major changes and
- appointing a competent staff — so absent,
his readiness to accommodate Russia and spurn allies so disturbing and his obsession with himself and his ego over all other considerations so consistent, two more years of him in office could pose a real threat to our nation. Vice President Mike Pence could not possibly be worse.
The damage an out-of-control Trump can do goes well beyond our borders. America is the keystone of global stability. Our world is the way it is today — a place that, despite all its problems, still enjoys more peace and prosperity than at any time in history — because America is the way it is (or at least was). And that is a nation that at its best has always stood up for the universal values of freedom and human rights, has always paid extra to stabilize the global system from which we were the biggest beneficiary and has always nurtured and protected alliances with like-minded nations.
Donald Trump has proved time and again that he knows nothing of the history or importance of this America. That was made starkly clear in Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s resignation letter.
Trump is in the grip of a mad notion that the entire web of global institutions and alliances built after World War II — which, with all their imperfections, have provided the connective tissues that have created this unprecedented era of peace and prosperity — threatens American sovereignty and prosperity and that we are better off without them.
So Trump gloats at the troubles facing the European Union, urges Britain to exit and leaks that he’d consider quitting NATO. These are institutions that all need to be improved, but not scrapped. If America becomes a predator on all the treaties, multilateral institutions and alliances holding the world together; if America goes from being the world’s anchor of stability to an engine of instability; if America goes from a democracy built on the twin pillars of truth and trust to a country where it is acceptable for the president to attack truth and trust on a daily basis, watch out: Your kids won’t just grow up in a different America. They will grow up in a different world.
The last time America disengaged from the world remotely in this manner was in the 1930s, and you remember what followed: World War II.
You have no idea how quickly institutions like NATO and the E.U. and the World Trade Organization and just basic global norms — like thou shalt not kill and dismember a journalist in your own consulate — can unravel when America goes AWOL or haywire under a shameless isolated president.
But this is not just about the world, it’s about the minimum decorum and stability we expect from our president. If the C.E.O. of any public company in America behaved like Trump has over the past two years —
- constantly lying,
- tossing out aides like they were Kleenex,
- tweeting endlessly like a teenager,
- ignoring the advice of experts —
he or she would have been fired by the board of directors long ago. Should we expect less for our president?
That’s what the financial markets are now asking. For the first two years of the Trump presidency the markets treated his dishonesty and craziness as background noise to all the soaring corporate profits and stocks. But that is no longer the case. Trump has markets worried.
.. The instability Trump is generating — including his attacks on the chairman of the Federal Reserve — is causing investors to wonder where the economic and geopolitical management will come from as the economy slows down.
- What if we’re plunged into an economic crisis and we have a president whose first instinct is always to blame others and
- who’s already purged from his side the most sober adults willing to tell him that his vaunted “gut instincts” have no grounding in economics or in law or in common sense. Mattis was the last one.
We are now left with the B team — all the people who were ready to take the jobs that Trump’s first team either resigned from — because they could not countenance his lying, chaos and ignorance — or were fired from for the same reasons.
I seriously doubt that any of these B-players would have been hired by any other administration. Not only do they not inspire confidence in a crisis, but they are all walking around knowing that Trump would stab every one of them in the back with his Twitter knife, at any moment, if it served him. This makes them even less effective.
Indeed, Trump’s biggest disruption has been to undermine the norms and values we associate with a U.S. president and U.S. leadership. And now that Trump has freed himself of all restraints from within his White House staff, his cabinet and his party — so that “Trump can be Trump,” we are told — he is freer than ever to remake America in his image.
And what is that image? According to The Washington Post’s latest tally, Trump has made 7,546 false or misleading claims, an average of five a day, through Dec. 20, the 700th day of his term in office. And all that was supposedly before “we let Trump be Trump.”
If America starts to behave as a selfish, shameless, lying grifter like Trump, you simply cannot imagine how unstable — how disruptive —world markets and geopolitics may become.
We cannot afford to find out.