The Family & The Family Money
Sometimes managing the family can seem more arduous than actually managing the family's money. Thankfully, professional who provide high-quality guidance for investments, tax strategies, and estate planning are plentiful. Experienced financial specialists facilitate good stewardship. But more money is lost to poor relationships than poor investments.
The allocation of assets among siblings and across generations can be enormously expensive both personally and financially. The challenge of family relationships can quickly become a nightmare for the benefactor, beneficiaries, and extended family members including in-laws, step-parents, and step-children. Unfortunately, neither an impressive tax strategy nor a brilliant trust document can comfort a disconcerted family member. However, strong family relationships built on caring, trust, and respect can minimize down-river relationship trauma and the attending financial expenses and long-term multi-generational family hostilities.
At the heart of these relationships is the family ethos. A strong family ethos offers shared values, traditions, a family identity, and a set of guiding principles that can be used across generations. In fact a shared identity might be the most valuable legacy anyone can inherit.
We work with large extended families and smaller nuclear families. We have worked with families who are fresh from a successful business transition and families who have been economically secure for over ten generations. We work with well-known families and families who cherish their privacy. We work with reconstituted families and newly restructured families.
Tolstoy wrote: "Happy families are all alike; but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Our goal is to support families to surmount the relational risks of being economically secure by providing a common language that establishes a strong foundation for ongoing communication and practice.
We work with families as they design and implement structures that promote communications that are "vertical" and "horizontal" as well as within individual households and between the extended family. An integrated communication approach helps the senior generation impart their hopes, dreams, and aspirations and provides the rising generations with the knowledge of their legacy and permission to create their own.
This integrated approach provides all generations with:
A process for understanding the complexities of family money
An opportunity to voice their own ideas, goals, and concerns
A framework for aligning those values with their own lives and careers.
An opportunity to voice their own ideas, goals, and concerns
A framework for aligning those values with their own lives and careers.
In our experience a family culture around money is inevitable. How that culture gets created and nurtured will impact the family’s ability to deal with the challenges and opportunities that the money presents,
both within the family and in the broader culture.
In our experience a family culture around money is inevitable. How that culture gets created and nurtured will impact the family’s ability to deal with the challenges and opportunities that the money presents,
both within the family and in the broader culture.