I used to tell our three kids when they were little, “Whatever I have you have. Whatever your mom and I have, you have. Whatever is mine, is also yours.”
But the reality is, I don’t always know exactly what I have. Because my wife, Dana, with her MBA, is far more equipped to handle the family finances. The savings. The investments. The bill paying. And she is really good at all of it. Thank God. She’s even created a step-by-step manual so that if I am the one left with all of it, there is an understandable detailed guide for me. She knows who she’s married to.
It’s always kind of weird when we are with other people and the men start talking finances and look at me with questions like, “And how will the Fed raising the interest rate affect you?” I have no idea. I used to be embarrassed and say, “I haven’t had time to look into that.” Now, at this age, I’ve taken the luxury of saying, “Ask Dana. She handles it all.” I don’t care what they think.
The crazy thing is — give me a client where I have to understand their cost of goods, overhead, expenses, profit margins, in the case of nonprofits — their fundraising and program costs, and I can ask all the right questions to figure out what bottom lines the marketing has to accomplish, how much they should be spending, and what my profit on all this work should be, with my eyes closed.
As my American-born mother would say in Yiddish, “The shoemaker’s kids go without shoes.”
So as a guy who backs up my back-ups, I told my now three adult kids with their own families, “Next time we are all together in L.A., we need to spend several hours with Mom, going through the manual, so you understand everything. If I’m the one left, I need to know you have a grip on all this stuff. And you need to understand everything … the finances, the estate, the will, the last wishes … together.”
Several weeks ago, the original family of five Wexlers spent several hours together doing just that. We went over everything. At the end, the kids asked me, “Do you feel better now?”
Better?
I grabbed a handful of my air-dried kale chips from Whole Foods that nobody else likes. “We’re talking about my and your mother’s demise here. Am I supposed to be dancing a Cha Cha on the table?”
My wife Dana sealed up the chips. She couldn’t stand the smell. “You got to just keep it on the surface like a business interaction. That how I dealt with it. You can’t let yourself get too deep inside.”
Of course she said that. She’s the logical MBA. In my world I’ve had to delve deep into the guts of the consumer or funder, and yank out their emotions. I don’t know how to keep things on the surface.
Yin. Yang.
I realized that this act of review was also about leaving behind some wisdom and insights. It was teaching our children about family unity, equal love, responsibility, courage, facing life’s endings and how to move forward with grace in your older years.
What did I actually feel? Even though it wasn’t the same, I kept thinking of the Torah portion when Jacob blesses his sons at the end of his life. The lesson I draw from that story is the responsibilities you have in your older years to be very clear to your heirs what you are leaving behind. In Jacob’s case it was his wisdom and insights. Even though this meeting with our kids was about financial information, a fair and equal division among the three of them and our last wishes, I realized that this act of review was also about leaving behind some wisdom and insights. It was teaching our children about family unity, equal love, responsibility, courage, facing life’s endings and how to move forward with grace in your older years. It was about overcoming fear and accepting life does not go on forever. It was about naturalizing, whether close or many years distant, that there is an end.
And what did I, myself, learn? Thank God for Dana, and her yin to my yang. While I spent years traveling the world, presenting, meeting, speaking, teaching, she held down the fort managing my business finances, our personal finances, thinking of our future, and planning retirement, while at the same time making her first profession being the stay-at-home mom. Because of her choices and insights, we were able on so many different levels, to have this meeting with our kids.
Gary Wexler woke up one morning and found he had morphed into an old Jewish guy.
