Kids, Wealth, and Consequences: Ensuring a Responsible Financial Future for the Next Generation

Chapter 11. Pulling It Together

In the previous ten chapters, we have attempted to consider wealth from several perspectives to help you think critically about your day-to-day choices and the long-term impact those choices impose on you and your family. We are aware that it's possible to feel overloaded and overwhelmed with information and suggestions that appear in the preceding pages. This book intends to inspire and guide wealthy families to reflect on how to adjust some of their spending, investing, estate, and parenting decisions.

You may feel that it is too late; your kids are already grown. "Start early is the ideal," Durham, New Hampshire, psychologist Dr. Kenneth Sole recommends. However, "if you have a nineteen-year-old, you can't roll back the clock—but we can start today rather than when the kid is twenty. Whatever forces in your life, as a parent, have caused you to delay thus far could cause you to delay even further. And we need to work against that tendency—so the sooner the better rather than not at all."

You may feel paralyzed. Where should you begin? How can you commit yourself to change what may feel like a comfortable lifestyle? How can you integrate some or all of the areas we explore to find the areas that might be most in need of fixing? And how might changing one aspect of your life affect other areas?

These are all valid concerns, which we hope this chapter will help you sort through.

Getting on Track

Embedded in this book are the tools to help you identify ...