Wealth Integration: A Multigenerational, Multifaceted Approach for Enterprising Families
Prepare for challenges, manage risk, and empower future generations
Estimated read time: ~3-4 minutes
What is wealth integration?
Wealth integration is about forming a powerful foundation for the future with multigenerational thinking and a multifaceted approach to wealth. It’s about how wealth can be integrated into the lives of individuals and families, productively. (And how individuals [i.e. inheritors] can avoid the Paradox of Choice and wealth’s unintended consequences.) Wealth affords access to opportunities and wealth integration helps families leverage their potential, and empower future generations.
The concept of wealth integration places the individual and family as the center of concern, with money as simply a resource to build stronger families and more engaged individuals. The challenge of successfully integrating wealth and opportunity into the lives and relationships of family members can be addressed by better understanding wealth’s impact on the identity, purpose, and community of each individual in the family.
The Pillars of Wealth Integration:
- Identity
Having a clear-eyed view of your talents, skills, interests, and values independent of wealth or opportunity is the first step of successful wealth integration. Who are you and where does or should wealth fit into the story of your life? Significant wealth isn’t something we’ve evolved naturally to deal with, so it’s crucial for each individual in the family to understand their history with wealth and to define their ongoing relationship with all facets of wealth. Wealth creators will likely have a different experience of wealth than late generation inheritors, for example. - Purpose
Identifying your purpose as informed by your identity, not the wealth or the opportunity, is the second step of successful wealth integration. Financial challenges that can drive purpose for others often don’t exist for the wealthy. Understanding and embarking on a different path to purpose is a crucial step for inheritors. - Community
Finding where you belong, where you can flourish with people who help you achieve your purpose is the third pillar of successful wealth integration. Sharing wealth through gifting, philanthropy, investing and spending and purpose makes wealth enjoyable and rewarding. Wealth can, however, often feel isolating and inheritors can find it hard to trust people, so a strong community is essential. Ensuring that wealth doesn’t become a barrier to relationships is an important skill.
How Continuity can help:
Continuity offers both counsel and practical training for wealth integration. Our experienced advisors take families through various frameworks to explore identity and wealth, to help them consider their purpose, and to help them understand challenges to relationships and lifestyles.