What are the real Tragedies of Wealth?

This book is designed to raise the questions, identify challenges, and give suggested answers to how to carry forward a 100-year plan for survival of the successful legacy family.

The biggest tragedy of wealth is running out of it.

These are the five major hurdles:

1. 1. Preparation and training of your heirs for their responsibilities.
   2. Many family wealth inheritors discover that it is not the FRB (Federal Reserve Bank) that has the biggest impact on their wealth retention. It is the FBR (Fast Burn Rate).
   3. The flagrant wasting of assets, dissolution of family values, negative family dynamics and caused by substance abuse. It is a family affair.
   4. The right to work. Your First Job is your right of passage to autonomy and maturity.
   5. An unproductive life is the ultimate failure and greatest cause of dissolution of wealth.

What are the real issues?

The impact of family dynamics can destroy or restore the continued survival of the family company, foundation or family values. A poorly designed and communicated estate plan can dissolve family interaction and future coexistence. From my personal and professional experience, I have discovered that many times it is negative family dynamics that destroys the potential bond. This will be explored in some degree in every chapter because negative family dynamics affects and poisons every branch of the family entity and destroys family unity that is so important for survival.

The fundamental failure to create a successful succession plan or successful sale of a family company can create the very dissension that assures family dissolution.

What Do You Do to Avoid the Tragedy of Wealth? What are the fundamentals that allow a family to continue as a strong financial family for generation after generation instead of following the course that most families follow which is "shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves" in three generations? What does a creator of wealth do in order to encourage the family to continue to operate as a cohesive caring entity for a hundred years? Is there something that a father or mother can do to keep it in the family?

The answer to that is yes there is.

Why create a family foundation since there are many other methods of sustaining philanthropy?

One reason is that often the foundation is the glue that holds the family together after the wealth engine has been sold. However it is critical to follow the rules for governance of a family foundation.

If all four elements of financial, social, human and intellectual capital of the family are not developed, then the family has no opportunity to continue the wealth, whether it is financial, whether it is political, or whether it is philanthropy.

This book is dedicated to families who want to build a legacy of being productive, competent and enduring.