Africa's $2.5 Trillion Handover Has Started. Most Families Have No Plan.
There is a conversation that has never happened before in most African families, and it is now overdue in millions of them at once.
Practical guides, African wisdom, and family finance stories for people building a lasting legacy.
There is a conversation that has never happened before in most African families, and it is now overdue in millions of them at once.
Here is the fact that surprises almost everyone, including people who have already written a will: your will does not control everything you own.
Here is a pattern you have probably watched play out in your own extended family. A relative does well. A younger cousin needs school fees, or capital for a shop, or rent while he finds his feet. The money moves as a...
Somewhere along the way you were handed a death sentence dressed up as a statistic. Only 30% of family businesses survive into the second generation. Only 13% make the third. A rounding error, 3%, reaches the fourth....
Here is a strange fact about the wealth industry. US Bank is the only major bank that even recommends holding regular family money meetings as part of building generational wealth. That is the whole tip. No agenda. No...
A man in Kampala once told me the exact spot where he used to sleep in his shop. Behind the counter, on flattened cartons, with a panga within reach because the padlock on the door was cheaper than the stock inside....
The most quoted number in wealth management right now is a forecast, and almost everyone repeating it has dropped the word "forecast."
The estate planning industry runs on one implied promise: the government is coming for your family's money, and the right structures will stop it. So families buy the structures. Trusts, wrappers, entities, policies....
The man who runs Hōshi Ryokan is named Zengoro Hōshi. So was his father. So was the man who ran it in 1650, and the man who ran it in 1100, and the man who ran it when the inn opened its doors in 718 AD, three hundred...
In January 2006, in an office in Osaka, a man named Masakazu Kongō signed away a company that had been in his family since before Islam existed.
Picture the default outcome of most estate plans, including the informal plan called "no plan." You die. After the funeral and the paperwork, your child receives everything you built, in one payment, at whatever age the...
The most repeated statistic in family wealth is not a statistic. It is a proverb wearing a lab coat.
Ask anyone on this continent what it means to leave something for your children and you will hear about the same scene. The will. The lawyer, or the elder, reading it. The land divided, the accounts revealed, the shares...
You have heard the number. Seventy percent of wealth transfers fail. Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. It opens keynotes at family office conferences. It anchors the first slide of a thousand advisor...
Wealth does not usually end in scandal. It ends in silence, and the silence is enormous.
In 1973, Vanderbilt University hosted a family reunion. One hundred and twenty descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt came, direct heirs of the man who had died less than a century earlier holding the largest fortune in...
Estate attorney Mary Beth Fanelli has a picture for what happens to the person who has to settle your affairs without information. In Leaving a Legacy of Love, she describes the executor who "drifts on the ocean with no...
There is a document your family needs from you that no lawyer can draft, no bank can hold, and no court will ever read. It costs nothing. It takes about an hour. And for most of history, it was written by parents who...
Most readers of the parable of the rich fool skip the first verse of the story, and the first verse is the key to the whole thing. Before Jesus says a word about barns, a man in the crowd interrupts him: "Teacher, tell...
There is a shop in London that has traded from the same address since 1698. Not the same street, the same building: Number 3 St James's Street, a few hundred meters from St James's Palace, its dark shopfront marked by...
In 1915, a young merchant from Saurashtra, in the Gujarat region of western India, stepped off a boat onto the East African coast with almost nothing. His name was Premchand Popat Chandaria, and by some family accounts...
Two governments claim jurisdiction over your family's assets, and they do not recognise each other's laws.
Your family's money no longer lives in a tin under the bed. It lives in SIM cards. MTN Uganda alone reports 14.7 million registered mobile money customers as of July 2026, and Airtel Money has been running since 2012 on...
Strip estate planning down to its engine and it is one job: moving what a family has built into the next generation with the least loss. Most families think that job is about land, titles, and wills. Those matter, and...