To the young guys- inheritance
Big Ben
Posted 2/19/2026 15:59 (#11557512 - in reply to #11557397)
Subject: RE: To the young guys- inheritance


Columbia Basin, Ephrata, WA
Chief Illiniwek - 2/19/2026 12:07

Another thread down the page had me thinking and wanting to say something to the young guys who are nearing marriage/starting families. Just some food for thought for those guys.

If you expect to own a significant amount of acres in a farm someday, you’ve got a sacrifice to make and you need to make the decision now, and there’s no getting out of sacrificing something. You can

1: sacrifice the viability of your family farm by having lots of kids and splitting the acreage between them at your death

2: potentially sacrifice a living, cohesive family by splitting your estate in less than an exactly equal way

3: sacrifice the joy of having multiple kids, but this allows you to give the whole farm to one child and keep the family farm whole


There’s no perfect solution, but I thought spelling it out to young guys now at least gets them thinking about what choices may need to be made later.



About number 2:
If your family requires everything to be exactly equal to stay cohesive, they were never cohesive in the first place.

An “exactly equal way” is fiction anyway.






Edited by Big Ben 2/19/2026 16:00
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