After three weeks of studying family offices, I did what any serious researcher would do: I started watching rich people fight. I am a researcher, after all, so technically this was due diligence, although I will admit it was also the most entertaining portion of my investigation. I now have documentaries to watch, books to read and several family feuds I am entirely too invested in considering none of these people know me. There is simply something about a family fighting over several billion dollars that makes excellent entertainment. More importantly, I started feeling considerably better about my own family. My parents were not left with much, and they probably will not leave me with much, and for most of this little Family Office experiment I had been looking at families with four and five generations of accumulated wealth thinking, Good Lord, we are behind. Then I met the Murdochs. And the Pritzkers. And the Redstones. And the Vanderbilts. And after a while I thought, You know what? Maybe we’re doing just fine over here. Because apparently you can have the lawyers, the trusts, the family office, the foundation, the private education, the board seats, the succession plan and enough money to ensure nobody in the family ever has to check the price of eggs again and your children can still end up in court arguing over what Daddy wanted.

Naturally, once I started looking deeper, things got messy immediately. The Murdochs (Fox News) had a secret legal strategy called Project Family Harmony, which is so spectacularly named that I briefly considered stopping my research there. If the attorneys have been asked to create something called Family Harmony, darling, we are well past flowers and a nice dinner. The family spent years fighting over who would eventually control the conservative media empire, and after all the trusts, hearings and legal maneuvering, several of the siblings ultimately took their money and left the controlling structure. So, essentially: Fine. Buy me out. Never talk to me again. The Vanderbilts demonstrated the opposite problem. They inherited one of the greatest American fortunes and proceeded to enjoy it with such commitment that I have developed a new respect for restraint. Mansions. Parties. Society. More Mansions. Those people could spend. Then Samsung gave me my favorite reminder that rich is not the same thing as liquid: the heirs inherited an enormous fortune and an inheritance-tax bill in the billions. Imagine your father leaving you billions of dollars and your first family meeting still being about how to pay the bill. That is when I relaxed. These people do not have different problems. They have our problems in better real estate. Somebody wants control. Somebody wants their money. Somebody spent too much. Somebody does not want to sell the house. Somebody needs cash. And somewhere, despite generations of sophisticated planning, a grown child is still saying, But that’s not what Mommy said.

But then I found something much more offensive: apparently, after you work this hard to give your children everything, you may have to start withholding things on purpose. I beg your pardon? This is called artificial scarcity, wait what? My parents did not cross continents so I could one day become successful enough to manufacture inconvenience for their grandchildren. I thought the entire point was to be able to say yes. Yes, we can afford the camp. Yes, you can take the trip. Yes, we can help with college. Yes, I know somebody who can get your résumé looked at. But apparently there is a point where providing every solution begins interfering with the development of the person you are providing for. And suddenly wealthy families are doing the strangest thing imaginable: having perfectly good money and pretending not to see the problem. Your child loses something? Fascinating… Perhaps you should find it. He wants something expensive? Wonderful. You now have discovered the need for employment. The little business fails? Oh dear. Anyway, dinner is at seven. And underneath all this foolishness is a distinction I genuinely had not understood before: “My children will inherit this” does not mean “my children will be handed this.” You can give children tremendous security without giving them immediate control. You can open doors without carrying them through. You can know perfectly well that one phone call would fix the situation and decide that, today, your contribution to their development will be keeping your mouth shut. I had assumed the great challenge of building wealth was learning when to spend the money. Apparently, if things go very well, one day the challenge becomes learning when not to.

And then, because apparently this entire investigation was designed to humble me, I discovered one final secret: some of these people do not even want to give their children the money. I’m sorry, what? I have spent weeks learning how wealthy families preserve fortunes for the next generation only to finally reach the next generation and discover that Bill Gates does not intend to leave his children anything remotely resembling the bulk of his fortune. Laurene Powell Jobs has been quite clear that she does not intend for Steve Jobs’s fortune to become some enormous multigenerational inheritance. Warren Buffett has spent decades saying his children should have enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing, while planning for nearly all of his fortune to ultimately go to charitable purposes. And then the Gates Foundation takes the whole thing one step further: it is supposed to spend itself down and eventually close. Honey. We have now gone from How do I make the money last for five generations? to Actually, let’s give most of it away and shut the building down when we’re finished. I would like my three weeks of research back. I learned about dynasty and trusts for nothing. But underneath this personal betrayal was something I had never considered: perhaps the highest achievement of wealth is reaching the point where you no longer confuse leaving your children money with leaving your children well. Maybe they get the education, the security, the exposure, the relationships, the freedom to take risks and enough capital to begin but not necessarily the entire pile of money. Maybe the family office’s job is not simply to sit around a beautiful conference table asking, How do we keep this money in the family forever? Maybe eventually somebody pours the coffee, opens the spreadsheet and asks the considerably more scandalous question: How much of this money does this family actually need? And after four essays about generational wealth, I cannot believe I am saying this, but perhaps the final stage of building a fortune is deciding how much of it your descendants should not inherit at all.

So I want to end this series with this, honey, if you are forty-two and just wrote your first will, you are right on time. If your parents never taught you to invest and you opened your first investment account last year, you are right on time. If your children are teenagers and the first family meeting happens around your kitchen table next Sunday, put out some snacks and call the meeting to order. You are right on time. If Grandma did not leave a dynasty trust but managed to leave a house and you are the first person in the family learning how to protect it, you are right on time. And if nobody left you anything at all except some recipes, family photographs, a good name and the deeply ingrained belief that you better not embarrass your people, then perhaps that is simply where your portion of the story begins. Every old-money family was new money once. Somebody had to be the first person to build something, the first person to protect it and the first person to teach the children what to do with it. Your assignment was never to somehow have started three generations ago. It is to know more today than you knew yesterday, put in place what you can, teach the people coming behind you, and remember that the purpose of all this planning is to give the people you love more freedom, not to build something they spend their lives trying to escape. Build the assets. Write the will. Teach the children. Have the family meetings. Buy the good shoes. But never become so obsessed with preserving the inheritance that you forget to preserve the people.

Always Have, Always Will ~ Kalie