Pulling this headcanon out of the Long Sad Post because it’s important:

it’s incredibly, incredibly important to Stan that he leaves his family enough money that they won’t have to worry about finances and will never have to deal with extreme poverty like he did during his drifter years. However, he also hates banks. Hates them. Won’t trust one as far as he can throw it (and that’s not very far, even assuming an extremely small bank some of Ford’s interdimensional tech to help with the throwing).

So, in the far far distant future when the family gathers around to read his will, instead of legal documents or account numbers they just get an envelope full of elaborate, coded treasure maps to, in Stan’s own words, “All the loot we found that probably isn’t cursed.” There’s a couple that are local to Gravity Falls, but most of them are international.

Clearly the maps were a joint effort between Ford and Stan; the clues are in code and range from elaborate riddles involving non-Euclidean geometry to family in-jokes. Quite deliberately, everyone has to work together to figure them out. Some of the notes (mostly the ones in invisible ink) aren’t even clues, just a combination of heartfelt messages and really terrible jokes.



All the next generation kids think this is the coolest thing ever. Soos, who’s getting up there in years himself and isn’t as spry as he once was, sighs, “Really, Dad? You couldn’t have just opened a savings account?” but it’s not long before the kids have convinced him to close down the Shack for a while and go on a Family Bonding Mystery Treasure Hunt.

They find most (but not all; some maps are stored for the future) of the treasure, and only a few things turn out to be cursed. By this point, Dipper and Mabel are both old hats at cursebreaking, so they all come out none the worse for wear and a lot richer. Pacifica, who’s the only person they know who understands finances on this scale, helps them set up a trust fund. None of the kids have to worry about student loans, and nobody has to worry about monetary safety nets. Also Pacifica tells them to put some of the money into things like art, because as it turns out she doesn’t entirely trust banks either, and they buy the ugliest most expensive sad clown painting they can find because it’s what Stan would have wanted.