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| Building Your Family's 100 Year Plan: The Series |
100 Year Plan Introduction: Making Meaning of Wealth Across Generations
Brett Anderson
12/01/2003
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"It’s very difficult for wealth to be transferred from generation to generation," according to Braden. "In Italy, there is a saying, ‘From the stable to the stars and back to the stable again.’ Only 30 percent of affluent families survive into the second generation, and only 10 percent into the third. The successful [families] have realized that their wealth is really for the benefit of their children, their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren. They’re interested in the long-term success of their business and the interaction between the success of that business and the success of the family."
Not every family, of course, will adopt a 100-year plan. The ownership of wealth does not oblige its creator to make meaning of his or her exertions. But for those of us whose notions of wealth extend beyond money—who grasp that emotional strength, ethical principles, and knowledge are also indispensable components of that definition—such a plan reveals much broader nuances of meaning to the patterns of life. The framework of a 100-year plan has as its object the expansion of the primary wealth of our families—our spirit and minds; that the preservation of financial resources occurs as a consequence of this effort is secondary.
The 100-Year Plan
as a Process
For many of us, the logistics of this proposition are daunting. "The first reaction to the idea of a 100-year plan is one of being overwhelmed," says Judith Stern Peck, director of the Family Wealth and Family Life program at the Ackerman Institute for the Family in New York City. "But it is less about planning than about the process—about getting the family ready in a variety of ways to redo the process over and over again, to rethink [the plan] in the light of changes in the environment, in their portfolio, and the family members themselves."
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