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Many business owners worry about how their success and wealth will impact their loved ones and the next generation. The fear behind it can hinder the ability of future generations to build on past success and even lead to family tension. To successfully move past the fear-based planning and toward a collaborative approach, five secrets and action items of successful families demonstrate how to effectively transfer the family wealth and values.

The creation of family wealth takes years of dedication, sacrifice, and hard work. To ensure that the hard-earned wealth is sustainable for generations, mentoring family members plays a key role in the successful transition of family wealth. Serving as an effective framework is the Family Wealth Mentoring Pyramid™ that incorporates five areas: Life Purpose, Wealth Theory, Wealth Operations, Communication Practices, and Wealth Governance.

As a young adult moving from college to your first real job and your own apartment, it's time to start adulting and being responsible for your own finanicial life, insurance coverage, and building your wealth. Here are a few items and easy steps to take that can help make sure you’re ready to succeed in the adult world.

When it comes to budgeting, there are a few basics: Track your spending, know where your money goes, and don’t spend more than you earn. These fundamentals can boost your financial well-being and put you on a path toward reaching your goals—but going beyond these basics can help you accomplish so much more. With this easy-to-follow guide and worksheet, you can start to transform your relationship with money and how you feel about budgeting. You'll also learn:

Wealthy families often take every precaution in preserving their legacies for future generations, with carefully constructed estate plans, wills, and trusts. But they often overlook the hidden factor that can undermine all these plans, and it isn’t investment returns or poor estate planning: It’s family dynamics. Studies have shown that the main reasons wealth fails to transition successfully across generations have little to do with making sound financial decisions—and much more to do with how the family interacts with each other.

Few problems are as vexing and seemingly impossible to resolve for families, advisors and trustees as the active alcoholic or addict, particularly those who continue to use after treatment. While low recovery rates for treatment and subsequent relapse may be understandable in the aggregate, on the individual level the experience is frustrating and unnerving for all concerned. Often the response is “treatment,” yet few family members and advisors are familiar with the success rates for treatment or what leads to sustained recovery.

How and when should wealthy parents educate their children about their assets and potential trusts? Having “The Talk” about wealth is a topic that provokes uncertainty and delay. Avoiding the exchange, however, only compounds the difficulties. Anxiety and reluctance about this conversation are understandable given the many risks associated with inherited wealth. This paper provides a few central guidelines to making "The Talk" an effective and positive experience for both generations.

Many wealthy families desire a seamless transition of their wealth and a perpetuation of their values for multiple generations, but many struggle with how to accomplish these goals effectively. Successful families typically take intentional steps to create family meetings that foster communication, education and engagement, in order to promote collaboration and trust among family members.This article provides a number of key elements to consider when developing a successful family meeting.

It can be surprising to hear that just 30 percent of families successfully sustain their wealth beyond three generations. The reasons for wealth transition failures are generally personal rather than technical—resulting from a breakdown of communication within the family, inadequate preparation of heirs, and lack of a shared family vision. Successful families consider the impact of wealth on their family and look beyond financial capital to consider human, intellectual, and social elements of unique wealth.