The financial planner that won’t tell you to pull a million dollars out (or ten!) and start your own version of a community bank because they’ll lose the clip on your assets under management.
The accountant who ensures you comply, but has no better vision for the world.
The wealth manager that sticks absolutely to a balanced portfolio of shares, property, bonds, alternatives and cash, and makes sure you’re exposed to the truly lucrative things like oil, gas and weapons.
Get rid of them all.
You want to know how to ensure the continuity of your family?
To have ‘succession’ without bringing up trust fund babies?
Take your position as an affluent member of the richest, most advanced society humanity has ever known, and improve the world.
Start local. Work out in concentric rings based on your appetite.
Find out what matters to your kids, then make it happen.
And if you’re advised to ‘tick this box so we can easily set up a sub-fund for you’, scrutinise the bag of capital you’re being rolled into.
If you don’t pay attention, you might end up skimming interest from fossil-fuelled bomb factories and calling it philanthropy on the golf course.
The ethics of our actions and choices are the important bit here – scale happens over time – start small by teaching your kids about the world through Kiva and micro-finance loans.
And if the idea of being honest with your kids about how much money is really in the bank scares you and you want to prep them for generational leadership, start them off by managing grants through a Private Ancillary Fund (PAF).
The kicker is, if you go with the community bank option I began with, you get all your capital back and keep reinvesting it. I was first introduced to the idea in Denver, Colorado speaking with Dr Stephanie Gripne of the Impact Finance Centre.
Imagine giving the local library a ten-year mortgage at market rates rather than letting a hedge fund extort them?
Bryan Goh and the Tsao family are excellent recent examples, and I paraphrase though essentially “we’re rich enough – let’s use our money well”.
And you can go hard on devising your Theory of Change and Impact Methodology, Duke University and IIX Global have great courses on this that I’ve done.
Or you can simply look in the mirror and ask;
Am I happy with the impact I’m having?
When you wake up tomorrow, and you look, pause for a few breaths, really look – what are your eyes telling you?
Do your riches make a difference to anything worthy of being called a legacy?
