It’s Never Too Early for an Estate Plan

The van Meurers want to to give back to people who otherwise would not have the opportunity to go to UW–Madison. Madison Bess

An alumni couple in their early 30s are one of the youngest ever to create an estate plan benefiting UW–Madison.

Grace ’16 and Michael van Meurer ’15 ran cross country and track as students, but they didn’t meet until they attended an end-of-season party and both arrived on time to find they were the first ones there. They joke that they still pride themselves on punctuality.

Perhaps that’s why they are thinking ahead with estate planning. “It comes down to it’s such an easy thing to do,” says Michael. “It’s also something I don’t have to think about for a very long time. It’s a really easy way to make a lasting legacy at Wisconsin.”

Grace adds, “We don’t have ties to a church or many other organizations, and Wisconsin really is where our lives kind of took off. We owe our education and our careers to Wisconsin, and we also met each other there. It’s extra special to us.”

The plan calls for the couple to give $1 million to the UW upon their deaths.

Michael believes that younger alums might think that an estate plan is beyond their reach. But, he says, “this is the time in many young people’s lives when they’re thinking about starting a family and protecting them, but you can very easily leverage your life insurance coverage for the things that you care about outside of your immediate family.” Life insurance forms a portion of the van Meurers’ plan.

Michael is in technical sales with Snowflake, a cloud-based data-storage company, and Grace is an art director for Alloy Marketing. On the side, they also run Studio van M, a graphic design company focused on the interior design and luxury hospitality industry. The business takes its name from a combination of their last names — in 2017, Michael Van Voorhis and Grace Meurer legally changed their surnames to combine the two.

They have decided to direct their planned gift toward endowed scholarships that they set up this year, with one for each of their respective majors — engineering for Michael and art for Grace. Grace says that an art degree might be especially hard to justify for students with financial need, but that a scholarship can make it possible.

“A big part of it is wanting to give back to people who otherwise would not have the opportunity to even go to Wisconsin,” says Michael.

Published in the Winter 2025 issue