A book co-authored by Gary Winter (Law ’06) has hit Amazon.com’s Best Seller List. Twice. More than Money: Creating a Legacy That Really Matters soared to the number three slot in Amazon’s Reference and Aging Categories. While Winter’s practice has focused heavily on the financial aspects of estate planning, his contribution to the book reaches back to his own experience as a teenager with a dying mother.
“Legacy planning” is a response to a more holistic approach gaining popularity in estate planning. Winter says many of his clients are more concerned about passing their values, heritage, and spiritual beliefs on to their heirs than they are about the transition of money and possessions. He says he saw this same desire in his mother, as she battled melanoma for several years before succumbing when Winter was 19-years-old.
Winter says his mother had lost her own father when she was just four-years-old and understood the value of the messages and lessons she had missed growing up. She wanted to create audio messages of love and wisdom for her sons to play back at future milestones in their lives, such as marriage and the birth of a first child. However, despite her cancer diagnosis years before her death, she delayed producing the tapes for so long that she was ultimately too weak to create them before dying at the age of 46.
Winter does more than just use his personal story to demonstrate the value of preserving and passing on such wisdom and love; he provides a series of steps to insure the spiritual legacy is created and preserved. He also points out issues many people might not consider, such as the advantage of using a third-party advisor to prompt questions in an interview format, adding it’s easier to open up to that person than to family members posing the same questions.
This is not Winter’s first foray into professional writing; he also published a professional article titled “Does a Williamson Act Contract Have Constitutional Status?” in Volume 17 of the San Joaquin Agricultural Law Review.