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| Building Your Family's 100 Year Plan: The Series |
100 Year Plan Part II: Are You Being Served?
Michael Sisk
01/01/2004
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Kiyosaki’s experience illustrates the importance of constantly evaluating our relationships with our financial institutions. The needs of every entrepreneur and family evolve over time. Businesses prosper, wealth accrues,
people age, grandchildren are born, philanthropies become passions. At the same time, the financial institutions on which our families depend—especially publicly held ones—can transform just as dramatically. Mergers and acquisitions, management shakeups, new business strategies, shareholder pressures, adjustments in the economy or financial markets all contribute to the strategic twists and turns in an institution’s long and varied history.
It is vitally important that we monitor our relationships with our financial institutions to ensure that our private banking needs are met, and that our bankers are still capable of meeting them. Without regular evaluation of this relationship, we may overlook products or services that would best serve our increasingly complex financial needs. We also may fall victim to the all-too-common indignity of being taken for granted by a private bank that may consider our business a fait accompli.
Kiyosaki now evaluates his financial relationships every three years. "A lot of times these guys will get sloppy; they’ll lose their aggressiveness. You need to have another guy check the numbers," he says. "The more money you have, the more important it is to do that."
Keeping Tabs
Even if our needs have stayed fairly constant, the pace of change in the banking industry has made it crucial to keep a careful eye on our relationships with our private banks; mergers or other changes can throw them into disarray. Darrell Mayeux’s unhappy experience with his private bank illustrates how rapidly the relationship can spiral out of control. Mayeux is embroiled in a bitter lawsuit with his former private bank, Fleet Bank’s Private Client Group, claiming the firm is responsible for losing virtually his entire $16-million fortune.
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