The Good Prince and the Beggar
The hearing could not start until the clerk had dealt with the baby. Fatimata Diakite arrived at a French family court with her infant daughter, and the clerk, smiling, announced she was...
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The hearing could not start until the clerk had dealt with the baby. Fatimata Diakite arrived at a French family court with her infant daughter, and the clerk, smiling, announced she was...
Everybody knows that money ruins families. It is one of the few beliefs that survives every border: the American sitcom knows it, the Nollywood drama knows it, the proverb in every language knows it....
At ninety-one years old, Gloria Vanderbilt was asked a question by her own son, the journalist Anderson Cooper, in the conversations that became their book The Rainbow Comes and Goes. Had anyone...
Somewhere in America, in the late 1980s, a girl turned five and got a business card for her birthday. Her name, printed on card stock, tied to the family's company. She did not file it away. She...
In 1864, a twenty-two-year-old named Gerard Adriaan Heineken bought a brewery in the heart of Amsterdam. He knew nothing about brewing. A century and a half later, the company carrying his name is...
John and Georgia White built a retail business worth several million dollars, and they flew their own small plane. That second fact is the hinge of the whole story. Flying together, frequently, they...
At her first meeting with her new financial planner, Molly brought a gift: a hand-crocheted hat for the planner's baby son. That detail matters, because it tells you who Molly was. Warm, generous,...
Elizabeth wanted a house so much that it was the first thing on the table when she met her financial planner. She was expecting her first child, and the house in her mind was never really a building....
Every young couple gets the pitch eventually, and it never arrives sounding like a pitch. It arrives sounding like an opportunity that respects you. A friend from church has joined a land-buying...
Warren Buffett once put a choice to two financial writers over a conversation they would go on to publish. On one side of the choice: all the gold in the world. Every ring, every bar, every coin ever...
Picture a family's wealth drawn as a pie chart, the way a bank brochure would draw it. One wedge is a plot of land in the village, held since the grandfather's time. One wedge is the family business,...
There is a new guilt circulating among African and diaspora parents, and it sounds like ambition. It says that steering your teenager toward a job, a plain, salaried, work-for-someone-else job, is...
Somewhere tonight, a young woman is rehearsing a sentence. She has the idea, she has priced the equipment, she has even quietly found her first two customers. What she has not done is say it out loud...
Sometime in the depths of the pandemic, in South Africa's Eastern Cape, a researcher sat down with the owner of a small construction business and asked him how he was surviving. The man's answer...
In 1997, a widow walked into the High Court in Nairobi to ask for something that should have been simple: legal authority to administer her late husband's estate. She and her husband had built that...
Ask new parents whether they have thought about who would raise their children if the unthinkable happened, and most have. The conversation is painful, but it is famous; naming a guardian is the one...
Ask a room of parents who would raise their children if both of them died tomorrow, and most can produce a name. Usually a sister. Sometimes a brother, a best friend, a grandmother. The name comes...
The idea takes up half a page, boxed off in the margins of a chapter about Easter, under the almost apologetic label "Bonus Idea." Put a box on the dinner table. Every day, each member of the family...
Somewhere in an American kitchen, around the year 2000, a mother reaches for the sugar bowl to sweeten her tea and finds a small toy sheep sitting in it. She laughs. She does not throw it away. She...
Pizza Day was Friday. Rob Knutsen, an American investment adviser who grew up to write a small book about raising money-wise children, can still picture the brown cardboard tray, the thick slice of...
One Christmas in Southern California, a ten-year-old boy set his heart on one particular bicycle. He hinted for months. He nudged, begged, and prayed out loud, strategically, right next to his...
Picture a grandmother sending eggs to market. She knows the proverb as well as anyone, so she does not pack them in one basket. She packs them in four: four baskets, carefully padded, counted twice....