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Estate planners who help their clients become more strategic about philanthropy in their legacy planning strengthen relationships with clients and their heirs and significantly increase the likelihood that their clients’ charitable distributions will align with their interests and be more effective. Whether creating a new estate plan or revisiting ...

With the world changing so quickly, the role of the family as a bulwark of stability and support becomes increasingly important. In response to this growing educational need, Family Office Exchange in 1998 formed the FOX Foundation. Operating as the Family Learning Center, the Foundation will serve as a resource to facilitate all aspects of "famil...

Financial families who have accumulated great wealth face unique challenges associated with passing that wealth productively to future generations, and/or philanthropic recipients. Being invested together in multiple financial and business opportunities requires a sophisticated structure for managing the family’s financial enterprise.

Educating the children of wealthy families can be an extremely difficult challenge. Today, more and more family offices are recognizing the compelling need to assist in the effort to educate heirs.

“I’m not the only rich kid worried about the voodoo of inherited wealth.” With these words, 21-year-old Jamie Johnson, heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, set out to record his peers’ angst over coming into vast inheritances.

Continuity planning requires a comprehensive and thoughtful process that should be utilized and extended beyond the family to a broader group of enterprises that will potentially impact the family for generations to come, including the family office, family business, and family foundation.

The most successful family foundations are strategic about how money is given away, to whom it is given and for what purposes, and in evaluation of the programs funded and the role of the funder. This paper examines eight strategies that distinguish the most successful family foundations from the least successful ones.

One of the most important aspects of a family’s legacy planning can be philanthropy. Family philanthropy can be thought of as the organized charitable giving by several members of a family to achieve a unified goal. It is more than the annual giving of one individual or married couple, though such giving is critically important in its own right. P...

One tradition that some FOX members take quite seriously is that of documenting their family’s, company’s and even family office’s history. To assist other FOX members who haven’t yet decided upon the best means of accomplishing this challenge, we talked with two family group, the Richardson Family and the Laird Norton Family, who have done an extr...

The day-to-day operations of a family foundation are naturally consumed by details such as grant reviews, donation formulas and site analyses. Though important work, family foundations focus less attention on the basic questions: Why give? What difference does it make?

For most people, being part of a family means learning the family culture and passing the family’s values through the generations. If philanthropy is part of a family’s ethos and identity, most parents agree that there are many ways to incorporate the concept as well as the practice of giving in day-to-day life.

The decision to make a planned gift allows the donor to satisfy his/her charitable intentions without the loss of income from the securities. Unlike an outright gift, this transfer is of the remainder interest only; the donor retains the current income stream.

The SO is a little known vehicle that can be used by families to give back to their communities during their lifetimes, especially if they want to use stock in their family businesses to fund the gifts. The SO is described in IRC Section 509(a)(3).

We hear much these days about how difficult it is to put together a career. The "younger" generation seeks more than jobs. They want their work to be fulfilling and to make a difference, and they need to earn a salary that they can live on, have medical benefits and maybe even save enough to one day retire. This is a tall order in these times of co...

Our advice to anyone hesitating to bring about an intergenerational family foundation because the time does not seem right or there are too many family issues to confront is — just get started. There is no better time than now to have the satisfaction of helping others and, at the same time, to give your family the opportunity to grow and to disco...