Harriet Davies
Editor, Americas
16 May 2012
Editor Choice
About half of the world’s largest fortunes are run with family involvement, according to a recent Forbes Insights report called Global Wealth and Family Ties, and this tends to be correlated with factors such as the type of industry the fortune was made in as well as the maturity of the economy.
For wealthy families, one of the greatest challenges of all is raising the next generation and addressing issues such as when and how to involve them in the family fortune, business or foundation. What’s more, many in the industry maintain it’s a challenge that wealth managers can and should get involved in.
“Families who are using advisors to manage their wealth need to look beyond the numbers,” says Claudia Sangster, director of philanthropy at Harris MyCFO. “They need to prepare heirs.”
Sangster has worked for many years with families of significant wealth and says one of the ideas that is catching on is (to paraphrase Warren Buffett), “I want to leave enough to my children so they can do anything but not enough so they can do nothing.”
