Credit - A Whispering Slave

It has nothing or little to do with taxes or the cost of living, nor with the conditions of society nor the economy. It goes deeper. It is a condition of human nature, called default.

It is easy to define default, harder to cure it. In terms of estate planning, it means a failure to take advantage of the opportunities that exist for estate building; failure to meet one's responsibilities as head of the household and guardian of the family; failure to provide security.

All manner of reasons can be put forth for default. The estate planning picture is complicated. It requires energy and zeal for the average person to find out whom to go to for help, or what to do. Successful people lead busy lives. It's hard enough for them to meet the demands of the day, let alone those of the distant future.

True enough, but we suspect that the real cause for default goes deeper. It is simply the all-too-human reluctance to accept the inevitability of age and retirement. Or, even beyond that, the inevitability of death. "No young man," said Hazlitt, "thinks that he will ever die." The fact is that few of us-young or middle-aged, men or women-face up to the prospect of either age or death.

The Romans had a way to handle this problem. Theirs was an age of heroes and the heroes tended sometimes to forget that they, too, were mortal. To remind themselves of this unpleasant fact they retained a "whispering slave." His function? To follow the hero through the streets as he rode in triumph and whisper in his ear the truth that all men, even he, must someday die.

The affluent hero and heroine of today could use a whispering slave. Sometimes, it is true, the slave does appear and issue his warning: to the person who has a serious but nonfatal heart attack, or to the person who sees his friend's unprepared widow forced to go to work.

But do we really need such drastic warnings to force us to attack the problem of default? We refuse to believe it.

The means to build and pass on a sound estate are within the reach of nearly every executive, professional, employee and businessperson today. They are not limited to the already successful but can be used by the would-be successful as well-by the young and old alike. The main thing is to get started, for if it is never too late to begin building an estate, it is also never too soon.

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