Don't Run Out of Pine Trees

My wife's grandmother lived to 95, and she was sharp to the end. She stayed in charge of her own life and her own decisions, and this isn't a story about anyone managing her affairs. It's a story about a principle I learned by watching.

Late in her life, she had mostly used up her liquid savings, but she still owned her farm in Alabama, and the farm had timber on it. Over time, timber from the farm was harvested to help cover her living expenses. Each harvest was another source of cash, and there was always a practical limit to how often and how much could be cut.

That experience gave me a simple way of explaining a much larger principle: when you're continually consuming principal to fund your lifestyle or expenses, eventually you can run out of assets to sell. In our family's case, the remaining assets happened to be pine trees.

Hence the expression: don't run out of pine trees.

A business, land, timber, rental property and other accumulated assets can represent decades of work and wealth. The question every owner eventually faces is how those assets will produce income, get sold, pass to another generation, or otherwise support what they're trying to do. For many business owners, the company itself is the biggest pine tree. If most of your net worth is tied up in the business, waiting until you urgently need liquidity is very different from preparing years in advance for an orderly transition. The same thinking applies to land and timber, which are often the quiet assets in a family, and to probate, where the question is what assets remain and how they're best transferred.

None of this is investment, tax, legal or financial advice. It's a way of thinking, plain and practical, and the specifics of your situation deserve your own advisors. I work alongside them.

Whatever your pine trees are, your business, your land, your investments, or the assets you've spent a lifetime building, the objective is to have a plan before you need the last one.