Where King Lear messed up

The plot, as you know, involves an elderly man, seemingly at the height of his powers, who decides to divide his lands among his three daughters while he still has all his marbles, reserving the largest share for the daughter who loves him most. Lear’s calculating older daughters, Goneril and Regan, pass his test by showering him with flattery, but the honest Cordelia flunks by insisting that mere words cannot express her feelings for her father. Enraged by this seeming ingratitude, Lear disinherits Cordelia and divides his property between his two seemingly servile daughters — who, once in control of Dad’s property, turn out to be not so servile after all: They reject and humiliate Lear and toss him out into the cold, leaving him to wander the land destitute and homeless (and the three sisters to destroy each other).

“There’s a harsh lesson to be learned from Shakespeare’s classic,” Carol writes. “A parent makes a fatal mistake in estate planning — one that destroys his family and costs him his life.”

Thacher Longstreth’s tale

Since I am myself the author of a book on inheritance (The Inheritor’s Handbook, Bloomberg Press, 1998) as well as the former editor of a magazine about family-owned companies (Family Business), and since I’m currently grappling with these very issues as an executor of my late father’s estate, I couldn’t help wondering, after reading Carol’s take on Lear: Precisely what was King Lear’s fatal mistake? Viewed through an estate-planning prism, what’s the moral of King Lear? Trust your real estate but not your kids? Hang on to your assets until your last dying breath?

For answers, I turned to the “Ten Basic Rules” in my own book about inheritance, two of which seem applicable here.

Rule 3: “Ninety per cent of the problems you encounter after your parents (or spouse) die can be eliminated by talking to them about death and money before they die.”

For example, the late Philadelphia stockbroker William Longstreth had three children. In 1968, when he was 87, William gave his Main Line Philadelphia mansion to his son Thacher (the well-known Philadelphia City Councilman and two-time mayoral candidate) in exchange for Thacher’s pledge to support him for the rest of his life. After William died six years later, Thacher sold the mansion for close to $500,000. This was a good deal for father and son alike: The father got lifetime security, and the son got a valuable property. (Thacher’s two siblings received a much smaller inheritance — but then, they took on a much smaller responsibility for their father’s care.)

One family’s bank

On the other hand, in the 1980s a small-town Midwest banker, the third generation of his family to own the bank, wanted assurance that the bank would remain in his family after he died. But his three sons had all migrated to more exotic locales and had little desire to return to their provincial roots. They agreed to return and work in the bank only if their father gave them his bank stock then and there rather than wait until he died. The father acquiesced, to his subsequent regret: The sons (much like Goneril and Regan) subsequently sold the bank out of the family anyway, leaving their father bereft of both his assets and his legacy.

King Lear, of course, did talk to his daughters about their inheritance before he died. The difference is that he (like that small-town banker) didn’t listen to what they were really saying. He simply heard from them what he wanted to hear.

Lawyers vs. therapists

This brings me to my Rule Number 6: “The biggest obstacles you’ll encounter as an heir will be emotional matters, not financial ones. . . .Many of the inheritance issues you believe to be financial will turn out to be emotional when you scratch the surface.” I also noted in my book that “equal isn’t necessarily fair, and vice versa” — that is, one sibling may want the baby grand piano, another may want the house at the shore, a third may want the art collection. Whether one commodity is worth more than the other often isn’t as important as seeing that each child’s interests are addressed.

That being the case, when contentious estate issues arise among relatives, instead of hiring lawyers and filing lawsuits — which will publicly air all your dirty laundry and probably destroy your family — you’d be better off hiring a therapist, gathering your family in a room, and letting everyone vent for a couple of sessions. It’s much cheaper too. If King Lear had hired a good therapist (instead of his courtiers) to help him examine his daughters, he might have asked them better questions. Surely, things would have turned out better for father and daughters alike.

Shakespeare, of course, was clueless about estate planning, not to mention therapy. But he instinctively perceived the central role of emotion in human relations. That’s the main thing anyone needs to know about estate planning. All the rest, as they say, is commentary.