What A Father Builds In The Dark

Fathers leave their mark in small, repeated things, and those things have a way of outlasting almost everything else.

But the fathers who think ahead leave something else too.

Femi Adegoke was an engineer. He spent his career building bridges designed to carry weight long after the people who built them were gone. He applied the same logic to his family, quietly and without announcement, the way engineers tend to do things.

He set up an Education Trust for all three children, structured so that each one had a ring-fenced fund for school, untouchable for anything else, accessible when the time came. His wife thought it was excessive. "We have money," she said. "Why lock it up?" He smiled and said, "Because we have money now."

He wrote his Will the same year he turned fifty. Not because he was ill. He sat with FCMB Trustees, walked through everything he owned, and put it in writing: the house, the land in Ekiti his father left him, the private investment portfolio he had been building in pieces since 2011.

His youngest, Dara, was eleven at the time. She did not know any of these existed until she was twenty-six, newly married, and her mother handed her a folder at a family dinner.

"Your father created this for you," her mother said. "He created one for each of you."

Inside was a recent statement of account for her Education Trust, every term's fees paid quietly in the background for years, long before she ever thought to ask how. The fund had run its course by the time she finished university, but the statement was still there, a record of something that had simply worked, without her ever having to think about it..

Femi was still alive. He was sixty-five, retired, and mildly obsessed with his tomato garden in Abeokuta. But sitting at that dinner table, Dara understood something about her father she had not fully grasped before: that his love for them was not just present tense. He had made it future-proof.

This Father's Day, we are celebrating that kind of father. Not the loudest one in the room, necessarily, but the one who is already thinking about the room his children will be in twenty years from now.

A Will decides who gets what,  and makes sure no one else gets to decide for you. An Education Trust protects what you have set aside for your children from every other demand that life will make on it.

Fatherhood is a long game. Estate planning is how you play it all the way to the end.

Talk to FCMB Trustees today. The best gift a father can give is one that keeps giving long after the moment has passed.

Whether you want to secure your children's education or ensure your assets are distributed according to your wishes, FCMB Trustees is here to help you plan with confidence.

Learn more about our estate planning solutions:

Read about Education Trust: https://www.fcmbtrustees.com/page.php?a=education-trust

Education Trust Form: https://www.fcmbtrustees.com/images/downloads/Education-Trust-Form.pdf

Premium Will: https://www.fcmbtrustees.com/images/downloads/Premium-WIll.pdf

Comprehensive Will: https://www.fcmbtrustees.com/images/downloads/Comprehensive-WIll.pdf

Wills: https://fcmbtrustees.com/portal

Ready to start the conversation?

Visit our website: www.fcmbtrustees.com

Email: fcmbtrustees@fcmb.com

Call: 0201 290 2721

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