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Growing up in a family business environment often rubs off on the younger generations, with some making the decision to start their own business instead of joining the family enterprise. Toward that end, getting help while staying true to their own ideas requires balance. Here are four steps that will help launch their independent business ven...

Teaching the joys, benefits, and responsibilities of philanthropy is often a top-down process. For most families, the starting point in encouraging a philanthropic mindset in children is to identify specific values that matter to them and to live by those values. Most important, continue to set a good example through meaningful actions an...

Couples nearing marriage often confront challenging questions and must make difficult decisions around complex, emotionally charged issues. Somewhere in the process of sorting out financial and estate planning decisions, the question on whether to have a prenuptial agreement may emerge. Here are steps that you and your families may find helpful in ...

Finding a way to facilitate trust, communication, and proper preparation and development of the necessary skill sets of the next generation can be difficult and will vary from family to family. Today, many families are finding answers to these questions through a private family foundation. If you’re thinking about staring a family foundation, here ...

Despite the leadership and great influence of the women who have shaped their family legacies, including the silent legacy of Louise Carnegie, their contributions have been missing or minimized in the family stories and historical records. With more women taking control of more wealth and the decisions around that wealth, their voices and positions...

Wealth coaching is essentially the study of one’s relationship with money and wealth. We all have a relationship with money, and through money messages that we learned at an early age, this relationship guides the majority of behaviors throughout our lives. Individuals and families who engage wealth coaches can benefit enormously across a bro...

Family governance need not be an oxymoron. A conscious family governance system can help create an efficient and rewarding means of ensuring the family enterprise’s viability for generations to come. Therefore, any family enterprise that seeks to maintain and grow its wealth—financial, human, social, and intellectual—should consider creating a...

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...

Every family has secrets and difficult stories—the “skeletons in the closet”—that they would rather not share. While most professionals agree that exposing skeletons to daylight is a good thing, one must be sensitive to the potential emotional impact of these stories on individuals within a family and proceed tactfully. When...

Helping your children learn to become financially self-sufficient can be one of the most satisfying jobs of parenthood. By “forcing” your children to make choices about how to spend limited resources, you’re creating opportunities to help them find their interests and passions and discover what is truly important to their happiness. The more you ca...

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 t...

While the scale and pace of women’s wealth ownership may be growing at unprecedented rates, the culture around wealth and money decisions is deeply embedded in history that includes philanthropy, investment opportunities, and seeing the first self-made female millionaire in 1914. In this four-part series, we take a look at how women and ...

While the financial markets have moved well beyond the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the public trust of a very large sector of the global economy is still severely marred due to continued bad behavior, lack of corporate transparency, accountability and proper risk management, as well as risky business practices. To overcome these shortcomings, ...

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 inves...

Making the shift from a “checkbook” donor to a philanthropist can be one of the most rewarding privileges of wealth. And while discussions about philanthropy often begin in the context of tax or estate planning, start with exploring what you want your wealth to accomplish and why you want to give. It’s also important to measure your philanthropic i...