Family Wealth

This is the aspect of your wealth that addresses the tangible, material benefits that your assets provide to you and your family. It is measured essentially with financial statements, profits and loss reports, bank account and investment summaries and tax returns.

This is the level where virtually all traditional estate planning both begins and ends. It is simply a matter of running the numbers.

Very few people fully understand the extremely dynamic social aspect of their wealth. Our government has designed most tax laws to offer you a distinct choice:

You can either contribute to the general welfare of our society through involuntary philanthropy (taxation)

or

You can, if you prefer, direct these funds to the social programs you choose through voluntary philanthropy (giving)

The taxes involuntarily extracted from you produce very little measurable benefit to our country, due, first, to massive government waste and, second, due to the sheer size of our country’s financial need.

Voluntary giving, on the other hand, produces a dramatic, measurable benefit to our country in very specific ways and these contributions generally are extremely cost efficient.

Given the choice, which would you choose?

This is the most intimate level of your wealth. It is at this level that one must struggle to answer the nagging question, “What is the purpose for all my work and the accumulating of all this wealth?”

“This is mankind’s age-old dilemma in the face of death: it is the meaning of the thing that is of paramount importance: what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance. Man wants to know that his life has somehow counted, if not for himself, then at least in a larger scheme of things, that it has left a trace, a trace that has meaning, And in order for anything once alive to have meaning, its effects must remain alive in eternity some way.” — Ernest Becker

Once you have really wrestled with this issue and come to a satisfactory answer, we have found that all the other FWC issues almost immediately begin to fall quite effortlessly into place.

Family Wealth Counseling:
Christopher Fisher, cfisher@koptis.com