Most successful people spend decades focused on building wealth. Far fewer spend enough time thinking about how that wealth will change what their skillset will need to be for their family’s future prosperity.
The truth is, assets are often the least important piece of a family’s long-term financial viability.
Money matters, of course. But strong values, solid parenting, a developed work ethic, and exposure to the right opportunities matter more. A family with modest wealth and strong character will usually fare better over time than a family with significant wealth and no shared sense of values.
For most families, the decisions they make revolve around where they will vacation and where the kids will go to college. Today, many successful families are realizing that real planning is far more expansive. It involves preparing heirs not just financially, but emotionally, intellectually and even spiritually throughout all their stages of life.
How you leave your wealth is often more important than how you earned it. And I don’t mean “leaving” in the sense that you’ve done an estate plan and it’s sitting in a 3-ring binder.
Good parenting and good wealth stewardship can sometimes feel at odds with one another. We all want our children to thrive and feel secure. But it’s easy to confuse security and opportunity with ease and comfort. The two are not the same.
Growth requires adversity. Success requires the possibility of failure.
If children are protected from every setback, every disappointment, or every financial consequence, they may inherit assets without developing the capabilities needed to steward them wisely.
The strongest families I know are not focused solely on preserving capital. They are focused on preserving purpose. They view wealth not as a finish line, but as a tool, one that can either strengthen future generations or quietly weaken them, depending on how thoughtfully it is transferred.
The transfer isn’t a one-time event at death. It’s a continual process done over the course of many years. Feed your kids emotional and intellectual spinach. They will come to crave it.
