Simon Cowell's Cryogenic Goals

In a recent article on The Trust Advisor Blog, Senior Editor Scott Martin discusses how Simon Cowell spun heads by telling GQ magazine that he wanted to be cryogenically frozen when he dies.  Cowell called it "an insurance policy" that medical science will advance to the point where he can be unfrozen and cured of whatever he ends up dying from.  For freezing the entire body,  the non-profit ALCOR Life Extension Foundation in Phoenix asks for $90,000 dollars upfront and another $110,000 dollars put in trust for storage and monitoring.  If just the brain is preserved, substantial discounts apply.  Mr. Martin discusses how Cowell's lawyers have it relatively easy because he wants to give all his money away, so it's just a matter of funding the cryogenics costs in perpetuity and then donating everything else to his favorite causes; however, less altruistic clients can theoretically re-inherit their own assets even though they've been declared legally dead, but this is of course purely hypothetical until someone is actually thawed.

See Scott Martin, Simon Cowell's Cryogenic Goals Test Limits of Conventional Trust Planning, TheTrustAdvisor.com, Sept. 4, 2011.

Posted by William Alan Nelson II, Associate Editor, Wealth Strategies Journal