Coming into financial independence and taking on more responsibilities for your own income and spending is both a liberating and intimidating experience. To help navigate some of the most important and common financial and investment decisions, a collection of articles is provided for guidance. The goal is to help break down complicated concepts into laymen’s terms and provide illustrations and tools for thinking through cash flow and investment decisions.
Family Engagement in Learning
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Meaningful Moments in Financial Parenting
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Communicating financial values and nurturing financial skills in the next generation is a far more challenging enterprise for today’s family than it was for previous generations. Social media, easy access to information through search engines, and dramatically different expectations call for creative ways for families to raise financially mindful children.
Strengthening Family Communication and Education
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For most families, a large part of multigenerational success hinges on how they approach challenges and create opportunities. In unprecedented times of social distancing and school closures, there are ways you can use this unexpected “family time” to your advantage, including enhancing education for younger generations and foster family communication through virtual family meetings.
As families and Family Offices look to increase future generations’ positive impact, high among their common goals, and common struggles, are delivering education and increasing engagement. Based on FOX’s thirty years of working with families, Family Offices, and Enterprise Families; conducting research; and engaging in consulting projects, FOX has found that the most engaged families implement six key best practices to prepare the future generations. Once these family learning practices are in place, a family will be more successful launching education and engagement initiatives.
What Matters Most to You?
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The most problematic challenge wealthy families face is not how to make more money, but how to ensure that it lasts. This requires focusing on something other than money. Successful families, whose wealth lasts for many generations, follow five key practices.
Many wealth management clients often want to know how to prevent their children from becoming entitled. Specifically, they’re concerned that their children will rely on family wealth instead of forging their own paths to success and will lack an understanding of money beyond how to spend it. Moreover, parents may inadvertently seed entitlement in their children even as they’re trying to avoid it. To sidestep the entitlement trap, here are five consistently identified principles to help parents create more self-reliant children.
Families that have accumulated significant assets want to know how to best prepare the rising generation to help them maximize the benefits available to them, while also minimizing the unique challenges that occur when navigating the world of wealth. Younger family members may have different approaches when it comes to wealth. Understanding where these approaches come from is essential when creating an effective family education program. To engage family members of all ages, with disparate beliefs and approaches to money, the best place to start is with what matters most: values.
You Actually Can Afford to Fail (Intelligently)
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Taking cues from entrepreneurs, families with great financial wealth would be well-served to create environments where their children can fail and in doing so, learn invaluable lessons about finance and resilience. While the older generations may set the tone by sharing their own stories about overcoming adversity, the rising generations will learn best by making their own mistakes.
Learning and practicing the basics of money management can have a profound impact on a young child’s life. What parents often overlook, even those who are investors themselves, is taking the education to the next stage once their children get older—say, around age 11 or 12. At that point, it may be the right time to start a conversation about investing. The lessons learned can not only develop the investor and entrepreneur in your child, but also the philanthropist.
Research indicates that multigenerational involvement is the single most important factor in sustaining family wealth into the third generation and beyond. Furthermore, the families that most successfully integrate younger members into their family operations seem to share the same philosophies and core values. It’s a family enterprise mindset that prepares the rising generation to be able to step in immediately and manage the family’s financial assets, run the enterprises, and preserve the culture and legacy.