Passing On: What's Fair in Family Inheritance?

Estate planning is a complicated process. Aside from the practical financial aspects, you often must wade through an emotional quagmire when deciding how best to protect your family and leave a lasting legacy. Questions naturally arise. What is fair in estate planning? How should you choose your beneficiaries?

A financial analyst won’t be able to help you answer these questions, but a sociologist can. This is the experience Ruth Dixon-Mueller brings to her new guide to “passing on.” Dixon-Mueller covers

• the history behind our testamentary freedom and the evolution of inheritance laws in the United States,
• the morality of inheritances and intergenerational transmission of wealth,
• the lessons the current inheritance patterns in America offer about economic inequality,
• the concerns of the parent writing a will for his or her children,
• the importance of negotiations between siblings who have been left property jointly, and
• the question of whether and how to involve family members in determining what is fair.

As you contemplate your future, the insights in Passing On can help you view fairness from different perspectives. You can then create an estate plan that reflects your personal values and makes emotional as well as financial sense.

Ruth Dixon-Mueller, PhD, was in the middle of rewriting her own will when she decided to review the sociological research on the topic. She began looking into the US system of "testamentary freedom" and exploring the concept of fairness in relation to estate planning. Passing On, the result of that research, is her first published work dealing with the topic of aging.

A former professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis, Dixon-Mueller specialized in the sexual and reproductive rights of girls and women around the world. She has written numerous articles on the subject. She is also the author of Abortion & Common Sense and Population Policy and Women's Rights: Transforming Reproductive Choice. For more information about her work, contact her at dixonmueller@yahoo.com.