Wealth of Wisdom

Introduction

Welcome to Wealth of Wisdom: Top Practices for Wealthy Families and Their Advisors, or, as we call it, Wealth of Wisdom 2.0.

Why “2.0”? Because it follows our first book, Wealth of Wisdom: The Top 50 Questions That Wealthy Families Ask. In that volume, we collected essays from leading practitioners in the field of family wealth, each of whom wrote about a question that client families face in managing significant financial wealth or a family business together. Those essays aimed to deepen readers' thinking and their understanding of the complexity of the task of mixing money and family.

This volume now turns that thinking into practice. As in Wealth of Wisdom 1.0, we have gathered insights from leading practitioners from around the world—more than 60 of them. But this time, we asked our authors to share with you, our readers, the tools, practices, or exercises that they had found most useful to families in their many years of advising.

The result is a book that complements Wealth of Wisdom 1.0. A thoughtful plan begins with recognizing the problems or questions to be addressed. But it then moves from that recognition into well-grounded action.

While readers would benefit from exploring Wealth of Wisdom 1.0 first, it's not required in order to use the exercises and practices contained here in this book. In the rest of this Introduction, we will share with you how we created this book and how you can get the most out of it.

To help you orient yourself to the many ...