Have you thought about the kind of financial legacy you would like to leave?

Financial legacies can be legacies in the old-fashioned sense of an inheritance, but they can also be a legacy in the sense that the way you handle money gets passed down to the next generation.

As anyone who has ever been around a young child knows, kids don’t learn what you tell them to learn. Instead, they learn what they see — and they’re acute observers. (So acute that they see things much easier than we do, especially if there are things we would rather not see about ourselves.)

So what kind of financial legacy do you want to leave? Even if you don’t have kids, there are other loved ones that could benefit from at least a traditional inheritance.

Me, I hope to leave my son with good money habits, and enough money that he doesn’t have to struggle (but can’t coast through life either.) And I hope to leave my husband with a good knowledge of where we stand financially, and no mess to cleanup.