Van der Merwe-Alberts - Passing the torch: preserving family wealth beyond the third generation

1. Preface

Ilze Alberts

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Copyright 2018 by Ilze Alberts. All rights reserved.

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

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Alberts, Ilze, 1958- author.

Title: Passing the torch : preserving family wealth beyond the third generation / by Ilze Alberts.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2018] | Includes index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017059968 (print) | LCCN 2018010658 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119486459 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119486435 (epub) | ISBN 9781119486442 (cloth)

Subjects: LCSH: Finance, Personal. | Families. | Wealth. | Estate planning.

Classification: LCC HG179 (ebook) | LCC HG179 .A399 2018 (print) | DDC 332.024/016dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059968

Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Image: BestPix / Shutterstock

Ignite and pass the torch. Unlock the high net worth in every family member for the ultimate prosperity and fulfillment of the family for generations to come.

I dedicate this book to my fellow torch igniter, Roelf Alberts, and our children we are passing the torch to: Charne, Jacques, and LouisFranz. May it shine brightly on your path.

by James Hughes

It is my privilege to join Ilze Alberts' journey as she imparts the wisdom of her deeply lived life of commitment to helping families and the individuals who compose them thrive and flourish.

In the book you are about to enter, Ilze offers you the gift of her awareness of what has helped families avoid the entropy that leads to their early dissolution in three or less generations and what those few families do who thrive and flourish beyond three generations.

She will share with you that it is in the great virtues of family harmony, family support of individual dreams toward all family boats rising, and family defining itself as its positive connections of affinity 1+1=3, that a family discovers and sustains its journey to longterm flourishing.

She will help you to appreciate that a family consists of four qualitative (spiritual, social, intellectual, and human capital) and one quantitative (financial) capitals. She will encourage your awareness of a frequently missed truth that a family's longterm success lies in growing the first four and dynamically preserving the fifth as a resource to grow the first four.

She will offer you the wisdom that a family who does not in its second, hopefully its first, generation form the intention, as its highest purpose and ambition, to flourish for many generations to come cannot succeed. To break the shirtsleevestoshirtsleeves proverb so often true, it must practice that intention through seeking to enhance the journeys of happiness of every family member, toward each having a meaningful life, all toward the whole family flourishing.

Valuably, Ilze brings to the challenge of helping your family flourish a depth of psychological mindedness and awareness of the gifts of positive psychology's developmental practices and assessments that I have not encountered in such abundance elsewhere.

By combining virtue, psychological mindedness, and proven individual family member and whole family developmental practices, Ilze charts the course for your family to flourish for seven generations and beyond.

I have deeply enjoyed my journey with Ilze in her professional life of service to human flourishing, now continued and artfully shared as a gift to all families in Passing the Torch: Preserving Family Wealth Beyond the Third Generation.

I have every confidence that as you and your family now accompany her on her journey to help your family flourish through her gift to you of her wisdom and experience; through her helping you imagine your family preserving its wealth, its human, intellectual, social and spiritual self; through her encouraging and informing your endeavors to enhance the journey of happiness of each of your family members, all toward your goal of your whole family flourishing; and by adopting and living out the philosophy Ilze imparts, that yours will be one of the very few families who truly flourishes.

I look forward to greeting you on our pilgrim's way as we walk together with Ilze to accomplish your high worthy purpose, the thriving of each of your family members and the preserving of your family far beyond three generations.

The purpose of this book is