Putting Your Family Back in "Family Wealth" A Series for Successful Family Leaders Series Overview: Epiphany "If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” – Henry Ford What if your family was more…
by Buddy Thomas Ready or not, here it comes—the widow boom! From the time the first of their generation was born in the mid-1940s, World War II baby boomers have created radical social and economic paradigm shifts, constantly reshaping the…
by Buddy Thomas Back in the 1940’s, a common tradition was for widows to wear black armbands for a period of time after their spouses passing so that whoever they encountered would be aware of their fragile condition and treat…
by Buddy Thomas Many of us understand the need for having a sound financial roadmap, but most wait until a major life event to lay one out. While planning for the handling of large profits or business sales proceeds is…
by Buddy Thomas Over the past ten years, the number of family offices worldwide has increased tenfold. What is driving this phenomenal growth? The answers...demand and technology. Demand is being fueled by the drastic decrease in the cost to run a…
by Buddy Thomas If you are like many families today, you probably have a living trust as a keystone of your estate plan. It is also likely you named you and your spouse as co-trustees. In doing so, you took on…
by Buddy Thomas Beating the odds of “Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in Three Generations” Around 2550 BC, the Great Pyramids of Giza were built thirty years apart by three generations of Pharaohs, evidence that supports the alarming statistic that 90% of…
Attributed to James E. Hughes, JR. “What is this thing we call ‘family’…families who see themselves principally as linked by genetic lineage, or by blood, rarely if ever…overcome the "Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in Three Generations” proverb. —James E. Hughes, Jr. in…
by Buddy Thomas There is an old proverb from India about five blind men trying to describe an elephant. While together they accurately list all the features, their overall understanding of what they are encountering is incomplete. They lack the context of how the parts fit together…
by Buddy Thomas Best laid plans don’t always work When her spouse Gary died at age 54 from a terminal illness, though grieving, Barbara felt financially secure. Before he passed away, they established a trust to assure Barbara would have…