Who is family? and What does that mean?

This Site is about accumulating and protecting intergenerational wealth. Family money. The means of comfort, education and freedom not just for yourself, but for numerous people who’ll come after you.

You may think only rich people the Kennedys and the Rockefellers need to think about family money. That’s not so. Middle-class people can and sometimes do leave enough money to children and grandchildren to make their lives better. The trick is to start thinking strategically early.

In North America, at the beginning of the 21st Century, we live in a consumer culture that argues against building family money. Media and marketers encourage you to spend what money you have and some that you don’t. The government conspires with this effort in two ways. First, it promises to take care of you in your old age if you’re broke when you get there; second, it discourages family wealth by taxing any money you have left to leave others when you die. There are ways to get around these problems. And, despite Hollywood’s versions, most lawyers and accountants deal at least in some capacity with this getting around.

One big reason lawyers are often obscure about what they do for a living isn’t that they’re afraid of lawyer jokes; it’s that they don’t want to spend a whole cocktail party answering arcane questions about wills and probate court. This book will deal with that hard stuff: technical matters about wills, living trusts, tax issues and powers of attorney.

But, before we get into the details of whether you’re better off putting shares of the family business into a generation-skipping or charitable remainder trust, you need to ask yourself some more basic questions. These questions will get to the core of what constitutes your family by blood, law or spirit. If it works right, this process leads you to an understanding of yourself and the people closest to you. And this understanding helps you make the appropriate decisions for handling the financial assets you accumulate by inheritance, luck or hard work. Of course, there are complexities in every family. Some families bring their own problems members who make bad decisions, members who don’t get along. Other families have external problems weak or non-existent standing under the law...outright conflicts with social convention. And, more complex still, the size and shape of families change over time. Children are born, people die, relationships break apart. So, any definition of “family” has to be a multivariable proposition.

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