Both your physical health and your financial well-being are connected to good habits and hard work. While good habits can help prevent negative health events, nothing is guaranteed. It’s important to have plans in place to mitigate the stress that can result from a change in your physical or mental condition. Along with addressing your long-term care insurance, there are other steps to take to incorporate health into your wealth plan and prepare for the unexpected.
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When we look back at previous generations, it could be argued that the primary focus was generally on creating wealth for wealth’s sake. But current next-generation family members are changing that, and dialing up the human capital and social elements.
Wealthy families have a significant positive socio-economic impact around the world, but lasting impact depends on those families prospering for generations. This is not guaranteed, however, and more intergenerational wealth transfers succeed if families adopt a modern Family Office model that suits their needs and goes beyond managing and growing the family’s financial capital over the long-term.
When families gather at their cottages or vacation properties, the senior generation might think how nice it would be for these multi-generational gatherings to continue after they pass. But before designing an estate plan to address the future generations’ continued use and enjoyment of this property, there are two important questions a family must consider.
In moving past the “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” adage, advisors in the family wealth space are emphasizing the importance of the family’s qualitative capitals that go beyond serving only the financial capital goals. This shift has elevated the family client experience and expectations. It’s part of the Wealth 3.0 movement that brings with it a refocus on the different goals of various family types, the importance of qualitative capitals, the evolution of family governance, and the human capital of legacy families and the rising generation.
Generally, parents lose access to their child’s health and financial information once the child becomes a legal adult at the age of 18 unless certain steps are taken. To this end, here is a list of seven essential legal documents for parents to complete when their children turn 18 and before they go to college or leave home for other pursuits.
It is not uncommon for enterprising families to end up making sub-optimal capital allocation decisions due to limited visibility into, and planning around, the entirety of their shared family assets. To optimize the value of shared family capital, both the business and other entities or advisors in the enterprise ecosystem must work in harmony. With a well-defined shared family capital strategy and holistic framework, enterprising families will be in a better position to grow and sustain their wealth, promote family unity, and prepare for the road ahead with purpose.
As enterprising families expand across generations, they often stray from their entrepreneurial wealth creation roots to a more risk-averse wealth-protection mode. However, if maintaining shared family capital across multiple generations is the goal, wealth protection mode is not an ideal strategy and may have some unintended consequences.
How do you prepare younger family members to manage their wealth well and flourish in their own lives and in the family enterprise? Every family is challenged to find creative ways to engage family members in the process of learning—about the family and what it values and owns, as well as what it takes to care for these human and financial assets.
No matter your role – whether you’re a family business leader, family office executive, family member – how are you preparing your family for significant wealth transfer or liquidation events? Said differently, how can you make inheriting wealth less like being hit by a comet?