If you’re wondering what types of things come up in office convo the week before Christmas, you’re in luck. Today we’ve taken a deep dive into the fictional characters of Home Alone (if you’re not familiar with the 90’s holiday film, please do yourself a favor; turn off your email, pull up Netflix, and watch it immediately.) While the McCallister family is entertaining in the movie, we couldn’t help but take it a step further and wonder what they’d be like as clients…chaotic, yes, and oh so satisfying! We love nothing more than a good challenge.

As this was a very serious exercise, we put one of our best on the case. We asked Mr. Thomas Schulte, Napier’s Director of Financial Planning, “What financial advice would you give Peter & Kate McCallister (the parents in ‘Home Alone’)? What kind of questions might they bring to us?” Ever the professional, his answers did not disappoint:

ADVICE: Obtaining a significant umbrella liability insurance policy to sit on top of their underlying homeowners and auto policy coverages. While ‘who is responsible’ for the litany of injuries and destruction against the Sticky Bandits on McCallister family property is in question, there are clearly significant assets that need liability protection. Fun fact: the beautiful home used for filming in Winnetka, Illinois sold earlier this year for a whopping $5.5M. That’s a lot to protect!

QUESTION: Our several children vary greatly in age. In our estate plans, how can we ensure that each of them are treated equally if something happened to us? Especially if something were to happen at a point in our lives where some large expenses had already been provided for the older children (i.e. college tuition) while the younger children have not reached that age and expense?

ANSWER: ‘Pot trust’ provisions/language in trust documents. This means that the separate trusts for each child are not distributed until the youngest child reaches a specific age (ie 22), thus common expenses are taken from the ‘common pot’ until thoughtfully separated.

Or course we’re only scratching the surface here – there are a million other things we’d love to get into with Peter & Kate, but alas…reality calls. What do you think, should we dive into Chris Kringle’s expenses as a business owner next week?