The Trickle Handover
Jean Brunel spent thirty-eight years managing money for wealthy families before he wrote Goals-Based Wealth Management (Wiley Finance, 2015), and the story he places in his opening chapter is not about investing at all....
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Jean Brunel spent thirty-eight years managing money for wealthy families before he wrote Goals-Based Wealth Management (Wiley Finance, 2015), and the story he places in his opening chapter is not about investing at all....
On the seventh of November 2010, in Jerusalem, a seventy-three-year-old rabbi named Adin Steinsaltz finished a project he had started in 1965. The project was a translation of and commentary on the entire Babylonian...
In Chapter 24 of Family Wealth Management, their 2024 manual for wealthy families, Mark Haynes Daniell and Tom McCullough pass on the words of a man looking back over his whole adult life. He had grown up inside serious...
The awkward question came on live television.
In 2003, the parliament of Denmark tried to do by law what every serious family tries to do by instinct. The Danish Financial Statement Act made Denmark, in the accountant Ronald Baker's account, "the first country to...
In 2016, the Bloomberg financial press published a three-hundred-page guide to family trusts written by three of the most senior people in that field: Hartley Goldstone, a former trust officer; Keith Whitaker, a...
On the eighth of August, 1914, on Mengo hill in Kampala, a man who had governed a kingdom for seventeen years stood in front of an eighteen-year-old and gave it back.
In the fourteenth chapter of Lifetime to Legacy, published in 2022, the Nigerian family business consultant Nike Anani writes two passages, a few pages apart, that most authors would have split into two opposing books.
On the night of 21 August 2008, inside Beijing's National Stadium, the United States put four of the fastest men alive into the qualifying round of the 4 x 100 metres relay. For three and a half laps of running, they...
Four children grew up in a trailer park. They wore ordinary clothes, went to ordinary schools, and learned what most children in a trailer park learn: that money is scarce, that you do not ask for much, that the family...
In the years before 2016, in meeting rooms across the United States, three veterans of the American trust industry kept running the same informal poll. Hartley Goldstone, a former trust officer. James E. Hughes Jr., a...
In the late 1950s, in Djeliba Koro, a village near Siguiri on the upper Niger in Guinea, a young history teacher named Djibril Tamsir Niane sat down across from an elderly man and did something the man's profession had...
In 2012, with the developed world still sweeping up after the financial crisis, the publisher Wiley released a book by an American father and son about why family money disappears. The father, Bill Bonner, had spent...
By traditional dating, on the morning of 28 September 935, a duke named Wenceslas walked toward the church door in the Bohemian town of Stará Boleslav and was cut down before he reached it. The killers were his younger...
Sometime in the years before 2014, in one of the meetings that James E. Hughes Jr., Susan E. Massenzio, and Keith Whitaker held with the families they advised, a father made a confession that has traveled much further...
In Brooklyn, in the decades when Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, led his movement from a red-brick building on Eastern Parkway, a businessman named Mr. Weingarten raised the subject of...
In Salt Lake City, Utah, the estate planning attorneys Andrew Howell and David York spent years watching wealthy families try to pass down more than money, and mostly fail at it. In their 2015 book Entrusted: Building a...
Two hundred and twenty pages into a book published by Bloomberg Press in 2009, in the raw months after the worst financial year most families had ever lived through, Bonnie Brown Hartley and Gwendolyn Griffith stop to...
In June 1858, the richest city on earth could not use its own parliament. London was in the middle of a heatwave, the Thames had become an open drain for two million people, and the smell rising off the river was so...
In the spring of 2011, in Carteret County on the North Carolina coast, two brothers named Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels were taken to jail. They had not stolen anything. They had refused to leave a piece of waterfront...
Part of Family E, the LegacyPot persona anthologies. Fifteen guides, sequenced. There is a season when the most valuable thing an elder can do is hand over well. Not too early, so that wisdom and steadiness are lost before their time, and not too late, so that a rushed transfer...
The hardest question in any handover is not who takes over. It is what you become afterward. Most elders are given two options, and both are wrong. The first is the armchair: withdraw, wait, watch television, become a guest in the family you built. The second is the shadow: keep ...
Most people treat handover as an event. One day, far in the future, on a date nobody names, everything you built will pass to the people you love, and the paperwork will sort out the details. That plan has a name in this corpus: dying with a to-do list. Here is the alternative....
Ask an elder what they plan to leave the next generation and the answers come easily: the land, the business, the house, the values. Almost nobody names the quietest gift on the list, the one the next generation will feel every single month for decades. Your own financial...