With the emergence of the great wealth transfer, family offices are intensifying their focus on legacy planning. Traditionally, this has centered on financial and legal strategies, often overlooking the emotional aspects.
Now, wealth advisers are seeing a shift: More families are prioritizing the emotional legacy they wish to impart, emphasizing the values and stories that will endure for generations.
“With the rise in global wealth, there is an increase in placing value on human capital — spiritual and emotional,” said Jamie Yuenger, the founder of New York-based StoryKeep, a production company that creates films and private podcasts for families to connect the generations. “People were giving money without the meaning behind it, without heart.”
Dr. Jamie Weiner, who has interviewed rising-gen family members around the globe to learn what it’s like to grow up in prominent families, said many of them suffer isolation and guilt and shame, a feeling of disconnection from their family elders.
“All of them wanted to find a way to stay connected to the family,” Weiner said. “They just didn’t know how to do that, how to do the rites of passage. How do you hand down nontangible assets to younger generations so that they are ready to carry a family forward?”
Weiner and his wife, Dr. Carolyn Friend, are family legacy consultants helping navigate these complex issues by leading family conversations and guiding them through storytelling.
“Stories are how values get passed on,” he said. “Go to any culture and pay attention to the stories. They reflect the values of that culture. Ask somebody who built a business what their life was like when they were 10 years old. That connects the generations in powerful ways.”
How do we feel about money?
For Franco Lombardo, the founder and director of Bermuda-based Veritage, the focus of his family coaching and advisory firm is human capital, which he distinguishes from financial capital and social capital. Most legacy planning fails to consider how the family’s assets affect them emotionally and takes a top-down approach, Lombardo said.
“It should be a collaborative process,” he said, “not a dictatorial process.”
Lombardo said one of his early clients was a wealthy Canadian family patriarch who was dismissive of Lombardo’s services because, he said, the man had 12 people looking over his succession plan.
“I told him: ‘That’s a great point. But I’m going to give you one word — perspective,” Lombardo said. “That plan is based on your perspective. What about your kids? Do they want it?’ He had never thought about that before.”
Typically, Lombardo said, the emphasis is on the money — “how do we make it, how do we save it, how do we transition it. But very little thought has gone into how we feel about it, how do my feelings impact the decisions I make around money.”
As another example, Lombardo recalled working with three siblings from a wealthy family. The sister, who wasn’t involved in family decision-making, grew up feeling that wealth had hurt her parents, who grew up in humble circumstances. She had decided that having money was dangerous.
“Once she recognized that bias in herself,” Lombardo said, “she started to get more involved. And now she runs their family philanthropy.”
The art of storytelling
StoryKeep’s Yuenger helps families prepare an ethical will to accompany the legal will that lays out their assets and estate. “One without the other is a poor estate plan,” she said. “When you’re leaving this life, you want to pass along your values, your lived experiences and hopefully love to your progeny and children and circle of influence.”
Yuenger started her career as a radio reporter and documentarian but found her purpose when she started working with family elders on making films for their children and grandchildren. Sometimes, it can be difficult to discuss these issues in person, and film has a power to free up the seniors to share their feelings and values. And it proves compelling to the younger generations.
“To hear their voices, to see their faces, there is a resonance that is really powerful,” Yuenger said. “It deepens their sense of respect and puts your life in context.”
She likens the impact of such films on families in conflict to the “melting of an iceberg.” Yuenger worked with a family in New York in which a lot of tension existed between the two branches of the family. But they all participated in a legacy film and watched it together.
“They watched it twice, back to back, and it was transformative,” she said. “They decided to have another get-together and go on a family trip together.”
Many families have their values written down in governance documents, but they’re just words on paper unless they’re living those values, Lombardo said.
He works with families to define their guiding principles — belonging, credibility, trust, loyalty, inclusion, trust yourself, respect, support one another, empathize, openness — and then asks them, “What’s the action that shows you living that definition?”