When you don’t have children, and you don’t have much family that is close to you, it becomes quite difficult to figure out what to do with whatever is left after your own death.
In my case, obviously everything goes to my fiancee in the event that something happens to me, but not to her. However, if something happens to both of us it gets a lot more complicated. This is really the first time I’ve given thought to how I want whatever assets I have left to benefit friends, family and humanity. It’s a tough balancing act, and one I’m not sure I can ever be comfortable that I got "right".
In giving some thought to this one thing I want to do a bit of is give something to charity. That however also turns into quite a bowl of monkeys since so many charities spend so much money on administrivia and not on helping the people they claim to want to help. This led me to thinking about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – clearly they don’t need to spend a huge portion of donations on administration, but they are reluctant to take donations and request that you donate directly to the recipients of their grants. Also any donation I left would probably just be able to pay for their daily coffee bill so…
<sigh>
Maybe I’ll just leave everything to a grant to fund monkey fights or something.
Of course at the end of the "day", if I didn’t get it "right" I’ll still be dead, so maybe I should set it up so that whoever I leave it to has to perform some really embarrassing task to get the money. Maybe monkey / human fights! Yeah, that’s the ticket! Give the monkey a gun and the human a banana and see how it works out. Woohoo! I have a plan!
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