James E. Hughes Jr. - Complete Family Wealth

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Copyright 2018 by James E. Hughes, Susan E. Massenzio, and Keith Whitaker. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-1-119-45321-5 (Hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-119-45325-3 (ePDF)
ISBN 978-1-119-45318-5 (ePub)

To my father, James E. Hughes, Sr., an extraordinary adviser to families and the wisest man I know;

to my mother, Elizabeth Sophie Buermann Hughes, who first taught me about family and who keeps creating family;

to my professional partner Anne DAndrea, who after 32 years still keeps me sane and helping and for whose help I am beyond grateful;

and to my partner in life and learning, Jacqueline Merrill, who put her arm through mine.

James E. Hughes

To my mother, Viola, for giving me a vision of what a complete life, well spent, is. Thank you.

Susan E. Mazzenzio

To my family, my friends, and my loving partnermy complete wealth.

Keith Whitaker

What is very easy? To advise another.

What is very hard? To know yourself.

Thales, the first philosopher

This book culls the essence of our prior books: Family Wealth (1997 and 2004), Family: The Compact Among Generations (2007), Cycle of the Gift (2014), Voice of the Rising Generation (2015), and Family Trusts (2016). It also captures insights that we have shared in dozens of articles, white papers, and blog posts, as well as in presentations to hundreds of audiences. We deeply appreciate all that we have learned from our many reviewers, our respondents, and the participants in these events.

Each chapter of Complete Family Wealth connects to others through themes and concepts; each can also be read on its own. Please feel free to pick and choose among them, based on the topics of greatest importance to you and your family.

In Complete Family Wealth, we have sought to present enduring ideas and practices. These are the insights and the activities that we have seen make a truly positive difference in families lives over the long-term.

Following are some of these enduring principles, which are reflected more fully in the chapters that follow:

The goal is not beating the shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves proverb in the sense of keeping only financial capital in the family. Financial capital is important. But references to the proverb have caused many readers to think that we advocate attention to qualitative capital for the sake of financial capital. The opposite is the truth.

Though our subject is family wealth, this wealth resides in individual family members. Their relationships are crucial, but the health of relationships and the family depends on the prior health of the individuals who are related.

While governance (shared decision-making) is important and sometimes overlooked, too much emphasis on governance ends up imposing forms on the family under which it cannot function. Sometimes it is easier for advisors to hand a family a draft constitution than to help them to live well together. But the former, if ever adopted, should serve the latter.

Welcome to the journey. We hope that in reading Complete Family Wealth you will discover new ideas and practices that will enable your family to grow its qualitative and financial capitals long into the future.

Complete Family Wealth marks a stage in the journey of we three coauthors, at times individually, more recently together. As we invite you to join us, we begin with a short description of our paths thus far.

Welcome back readers of our previous books, and welcome new readers! For those of you pilgrims wearing your scallop shells and round hats and carrying your staffs, walking with us to Santiago to discover how to help your families flourish, please sit down, take off your regalia, and join Keith and Susan and me in the next steps of our common plerinages. For those of you just joining please ask those who are already on this journey for their help and their stories of success in overcoming the obstacles their families face to flourishing.

As many readers already know, my journey to help my family deal with the proverb of shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations began when I was four years old. I overheard my mother, Elizabeth Buermann, in an agitated state, explaining to my father, James E. Hughes, her concerns about money and her worries about the proverb. Her worries continued until her death at the age of 95.