Adam Cooperman opened a technology consulting firm in New York City at age 33 — impressive for his youth by all accounts. He had no spouse and no children, but his small business success meant he had some assets to speak of.
“If I have all these professional matters,” he told The New York Times this month, “I should probably have my personal affairs in order, as well.”
Taking those matters into his own hands, Cooperman enlisted some professional help and devised an estate plan that would protect his health and his finances in the event of unexpected misfortune.
As a single man and an entrepreneur, Cooperman chose to divide his assets equally between his parents and his brother. But because they were still living in California, he looked for someone a little closer to home to take charge of emergency considerations.
When assigning a healthcare proxy and making other important decisions pertaining to his advance medical directives, Cooperman told the Times he looked to “people that I valued as mentors, advisers and friends” who lived near New York.
Once upon a time, stories like Cooperman’s were rare enough to merit attention in the Times. Young entrepreneurs did not establish successful IT firms in the country’s biggest city every day. But in an evolving economy, those stories are becoming much more common.
Young people running their own booming businesses from a laptop are, in many ways, the face of the new American economy. And as a result, the Times reports, there is now burgeoning interest in estate planning among the people who used to value it the least — the young.
That’s a good thing. In a country where the majority of working adults still don’t have an estate plan of any kind, a generational shift toward proactive planning could bode well for the future.
Maybe Cooperman’s story sounds familiar. If you or someone you know — your child, perhaps, or maybe a niece or nephew — is making some success for him- or herself, you might strongly consider making a comprehensive estate plan to protect that success for the future… even if you don’t foresee children or marriage on the horizon.
We all live different lives, after all, and explore different careers, but they have this much in common — we never know what’s going to happen next.
