Affluence of Resource; Scarcity of Support.
People get confused about affluence. The American Heritage Dictionary describes it as “a plentiful supply of material goods; wealth. A great quantity; an abundance.” This makes sense and is easy to understand on the surface, but there are nuances of affluence that most people don’t understand.Affluence does not mean “no problems”, although many people tend to view it that way. In fact, families of affluence have significant challenges to address, and this is where the scarcity can appear. For example, many families of affluence are addressing challenges such as:
- Designing an approach for intelligently passing their wealth on to the next generation
- Ensuring their heirs have the financial aptitude to appropriately steward the assets of the family
- Business succession challenges for family enterprises
- Dealing with multiple legal, accounting and financial advisors in a unified fashion
- Equalizing estate assets between family members, which can be truly complex
- Creating asset growth over time without unduly risking the family assets
- Equipping their children to be able to earn their own wealth and not rely solely on the family wealth
Wealth brings its own challenges and one area where many families of affluence face the greatest scarcity, or deficit, is when they begin to search for the appropriate support they need to address their concerns. There are few firms equipped to work with the truly diverse needs of affluent families.Your family needs an advisory team that has the technical skills to operate at an advanced level, the quarterbacking skills to harness all of the outside resources to a common purpose, and the empathy to support the family as it comes to terms with how it wants to build its future, and how it wants to be remembered.Affluence makes many resources plentifully available, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t “lack”. It just comes in a different form.
