I read two books while on vacation the last couple of weeks: Preparing Heirs: Five Steps to a Successful Transition of Family Wealth and Values by Roy Williams and Vic Preisser, and Family Wealth: How Family Members and Their Advisers Preserve Human, Intellectual, and Financial Assets for Generations, by James E. Hughes, Jr.

Preparing Heirs goes into depth about the research behind a number one of our advisors mentioned to us: in a study of 3,250 families with significant financial assets, 70% of them failed to transfer their assets successfully to the next generation. What does that mean? They either lost all their money, or they found that the money destroyed family relationships. It blew the family apart in the inheriting generation.

When I read Preparing Heirs, I thought it provided some good insights, especially into the causes of failure. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’ve already read Jay Link’s Family Wealth Counseling.

He’s issued a clarion call to pay attention not only to the financial aspects of an estate plan or legacy plan, but, I would say, he calls our attention even more to the social and spiritual/emotional issues related to one’s . . . lifetime legacy.

I chose those last two words carefully.

I think we aren’t normally challenged to think in terms of our lives when it comes to estate planning. We are led to think in terms of death, dying, and what happens after our lives are over.

Link, by contrast, calls us to Read the rest of this entry »

Yipes! it’s been two months since S___ agreed to help us find a replacement legacy planner for G____.

S____ told us today that he has vetted seven planners and decided that none of them matched our needs. When he finally thought he had found one and brought us together with him for a final interview, frankly, all three of us–Sarita, S____, and I–were shocked at how the planner handled the interview. Read the rest of this entry »

I met today with G_____, the guy who is helping us set our family legacy goals. He gave me a preliminary read-out on “where we’re headed” financially. Pretty mind-blowing. I’m having him revise his “assumptions” in a few spots, but no matter how the assumptions go, we are looking at a potentially truly HUGE fortune to deal with before Sarita and I die.

Assuming death dates of 2040 (when we’d both be in our mid-80s) and assuming several other things as G_____ did (for example, low single-digit yields and mid- to higher-single-digit growth in most investments), we are looking at a combined net worth of well over a hundred million dollars at the time of our death. Even if we give away 50% to 70% of our Adjusted Gross Income on an annual basis.

Frankly . . . honestly . . . this seems unbelievable. It is . . . just . . . beyond belief. Beyond imagination. It “can’t” be true.

And, honestly, I am unwilling to go along with some of his assumptions. For example, Read the rest of this entry »

Sarita and I had a meeting today–all day, 8 am till about 4:30 pm, with a working lunch in between!–with G____, our legacy planner, and T____, a man who, it turns out, is a fourth-generation heir of a very large family fortune. T____ turned my mind a bit–or, actually, a lot–concerning the idea of “giving everything away” as much as possible (rather than possibly passing a [financial] legacy along to our kids).

In essence, he argued for the idea that money in a future generation’s hands can be used for good. And we should encourage them to use it for good.

Perhaps the most inspiring comment had to do with enabling our kids to do significant work whether or not they were paid decent wages to do it. Thus, as he said, Read the rest of this entry »

So I met with our investment advisor and prospective legacy planner. I just wrote the following letter to these two men. I want them to know “where we’re coming from”:

Dear G___ & S____:

You’ve got to understand that Sarita often takes hours or days to mull things over. Today, it has taken only hours.

I think you need to know what she has said. Obviously, her comments impact me. I’d appreciate hearing your (either or both of your) responses.

Read the rest of this entry »