I took my chances, and proved myself right in the process. My children can be trusted to do as instructed. Having given them all my income-generating capital with no official strings attached, they could have conspired against me, but this did not happen. They followed my instruction to send half their capital income to my wife who acts as my proxy here in Portugal. Nowhere am I officially involved in any of this. It is based solely on trust and informal instructions passed around in e-mails.
Key to this success is the fact that everybody benefits. I am not abusing my authority, nor am I the only one reaping an early harvest from all of this. My children in Norway get to do whatever they please with their share of the income. There is also a psychological benefit to this in that they have to act responsibly in order to ensure that they keep their side of the deal. They do not have a rich father that they can go to for help. They have a poor father that they have to take care of. It is they who are rich, at least on paper.
This is the sort of arrangement that promotes responsible and mature behavior in the younger generation, and is for this reason alone something that I think more people should do. Everyone benefits from this, not least the children who become more mature than they otherwise would have been. This gives them an edge in society. They are more likely to land a good job, and find a mature and reliable spouse.
While I have always known that trust is an important part of any successful arrangement, it wasn't before my divorce from my first wife back in 2003 that the true scope of this became fully apparent.
I made a point of not involving any lawyers into the divorce procedures. I knew intuitively that the introduction of lawyers would do nothing good. It would cost a small fortune, and the result would be a nasty mess. Instead, I sketched out an agreement on paper, that we both signed. It was so generous towards my ex that it was self evident that a lawyer could not have come up with a better deal.
The benefit to me in this was that I saved myself a lot of up front expenses. I also proved that I was far more reasonable than my ex had made me out to be. In a broader perspective, it was also clear that whatever I was over-paying to my ex would to a large extent benefit my three children. She was not going to spend everything selfishly on herself. The over-paying was in a way an early inheritance.
Having seen that trust could be found, even in my ex, it was not hard to trust my children to behave loyally towards me some 13 years later. The fact that I never used a lawyer against my ex may similarly have given my children reason to trust me. The positive consequence of my actions in the past are in this way blessing me in the present. As I sit here, thinking back, I'm glad I did nothing to squander trust within the family, because it is without doubt my biggest asset.
Trust
By Gustav Adolph Hennig - scan of painting, Public Domain, Link
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