My father should have died worth something like $5 million.

By Vena Jones-Cox

Instead, he died owning two houses with a combined value of less than $200,000, with almost no cash in the bank, and living mostly off Social Security.

Dad was a sort of real estate pioneer. He was smart, a millionaire back when a million dollars was real money, one of the founders of Cincinnati REIA, and the teacher of what was probably the most popular real estate investing class in Southern Ohio.

Through DECADES (he bought his first apartment building in 1964 and his last rental house around 2004) of work and sacrifice, he built a portfolio of about 100 apartments and 150 single-family houses.

And then he got Alzheimer’s.

Long before the official diagnosis, we could all see that something was wrong with his executive functioning.

A roof would leak, and he would spend weeks waffling about whether it needed to be repaired or replaced. Properties sat vacant longer and longer and deteriorated further and further. The manager of one of his apartment buildings essentially stopped managing it, leaving a heavily mortgaged building with a broken boiler and only two tenants in 13 units—one of whom wasn’t paying.

Dad knew, at least off and on, what needed to be done.

But increasingly, he couldn’t make himself do it.

And because his entire identity was wrapped up in being the brilliant real estate expert and self-made millionaire, he became fiercely protective of his right to keep running the business. Even after he understood that he had Alzheimer’s, he wouldn’t let his children—several of whom had worked in his business over the years—step in and fix things.

By the time my mother was able to get guardianship, the real estate market was collapsing. Properties that could have been sold for a profit, even vacant and in bad condition, in 2005 or 2006 were now underwater. The vacancy was around 30%. There wasn’t enough cash flow to make repairs or save everything.

And my mother saw all the problems, but couldn’t handle them.

She didn’t know how to manage the properties, get them occupied, choose which ones to save, or hire the right people. She didn’t know that she should call an agent instead of selling valuable properties to wholesalers.

Dad knew all of that.

But Dad could no longer help her.

Over the next several years, properties were lost to foreclosure and tax sales. To prevent other foreclosures, she sold many of the best assets—including all three apartment buildings—while some of the worst ones remained.

She got over a million from those sales, but that cash was quickly eaten up in taxes, judgements, and vain efforts to save other assets that weren’t worth saving.

Their own home eventually went into foreclosure, too.

If my father had understood what was happening, he would have been horrified.

He had spent his life building wealth that should have left his widow financially secure and given his five children an extraordinary legacy.

Instead, my mother ended up living rent-free in a house owned by one of her children, and the estate my father had sacrificed so much to build was almost completely gone.

This wasn’t because he didn’t know how to invest.

It was because he never made a plan for EXACTLY what would happen when he could no longer be the person who knew everything, decided everything and ran everything.

In a perfect world, he would have WRITTEN DOWN what my mother should do if he were gone—physically or, as it turned out, mentally—to most quickly, effectively, and profitably get that giant portfolio that required active management down to the 50 paid-off units that would have allowed her to spend her final years doing whatever she wanted, wherever she wanted, with whomever she wanted.

We had never had the necessary conversation with him while he was healthy, even though his own mother had suffered from dementia. And it wasn’t our job to bring up or solve the potential future health problems of our father.

It was his.

That conversation needed to happen decades earlier—not after the symptoms appeared.

And that’s why I want every real estate investor—and the person who may someday have to take over their affairs—to attend How to Die Right as a Real Estate Investor on September 12^th.

It’s ABOUT your responsibility, as a real estate investor with assets that your heirs probably don’t even understand, to have these conversations and lay out these plans NOW.

Because building generational wealth isn’t enough to pass on generational wealth. You also need a plan that makes sure your family can preserve it when you’re no longer able to tell them what to do.