Family Wealth Consulting
While significant wealth can make life easier and more comfortable in many ways, relationships inside the family and out are often made more complicated. We engage individual family members, family subgroups and often entire families to cultivate their strengths and untapped potentials while identifying difficult stumbling blocks in order to align the family with its long-term vision. We do so with an eye toward family cohesiveness and effective stewardship of wealth. We coordinate with your other advisors or bring in our own team in an interdisciplinary approach.
Some of the most common areas for family wealth consulting are:
- Improving family communication and decision making over issues such as estate planning, philanthropy, fairness
- Raising responsible and motivated children
- Dealing with sudden wealth (inheritance, lottery win, entrepreneurial success)
- Managing conflict between family members or family branches
- Assisting couples in conflict (may have come from different financial backgrounds or have different values about money and how it is spent and managed)
- Articulating family values and developing a family mission statement
- Preparing heirs for future responsibilities, rights and privileges
- Addressing family conflict between siblings, cousins or generations
related to money/shared assets - Creating a philanthropic mission with social impact
Family meetings are considered a best practice for families of wealth and serve to educate family members, open communication, decrease conflict and, ultimately, help families develop a responsible and motivated next generation of stewardship. Developing family governance (a type of family teamwork for cooperative decision making and relating history and values) is an important goal of family meetings.
Family meetings may last a day or more and occur over time. These meetings often include entire families at once and can be organized so that young children and teens have separate time to learn about family history and understand developmentally appropriate aspects of the family’s assets.