Transferring Wealth Part 2 | Family Meetings, Gifting, and Legacy Planning

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Jessica Gibbs (Co-Host):

Welcome back to Off the Wall. I’m Jessica Gibbs.

David B. Armstrong (Co-Host):

I’m Dave Armstrong.

Jessica Gibbs (Co-Host):

And this is part two episode with our guest, Rich Orlando, who is an expert in talking about legacy planning and how to pass on wealth successfully to the next generation. So if you have not already listened to episode one highly encourage, you go back and listen to that first. This part two, we’re going to be doing a deep dive into some of the things we talked about in the first episode.

David B. Armstrong (Co-Host):

And one of those things that we talked about in the first episode was a term that Richard introduced called the Hedonic Treadmill. And the reason that stuck out with me so much, Richard, was because I think one of the things that, I’m a Gen X’er, and I think that Gen X’ers and Baby Boomers may not be able to relate to is how much social media is driving that hedonic treadmill. The wants of the younger generations. They are exposed to so many things that they may feel like they should have or need to have that are just really not important. Really expensive things you mentioned in the first episode, the expensive sneakers, you could say expensive handbags or expensive shoes or things like that. And I just wonder how much of that is now factoring into even an accelerated need to have this sort of conversation with your kids where you’re talking about the value of the money.

Richard Orlando (Guest):

It’s good to be back, but we’re having a chance to continue our conversation. So yes, I think social media and influencers and all that goes with that is escalating or almost exponentially making this point even more important. The point being, how do parents provide the perspective and sometimes counter perspective of what might be messaged through all kinds of channels, especially the social media channels on what’s important, and a very much ties to what we all were talking about in the first episode, which is what are those core shared values and purpose of who we are as people and who our resources, and for our resources. So yes, it’s important because whether we’re talking about, as you said, the next nice pair of sneakers or the next nice whatever the luxury brand is or whatever the influencers might be pushing or sharing how important it is to not only have your family anchored as best as you can through conversation, through modeling, through mentoring, through reinforcement, through decisions on how your family buys or doesn’t buy into this. But literally and figuratively, it’s very important, especially when your family has more resources that it can buy and purchase a lot of wants, not just needs. And as someone on our team at Legacy Capital once said, is when you have enough resources that you can buy pretty much or meet the needs and wants of your children, then what’s your how do you decide not to? And that goes back to why these conversations, to the credit of you, David and Jessica, are having with your clients. And on our podcast together here is the hedonic treadmill is a trap, and that’s for anybody. Whatever level of resources you’re at is the idea that in some way the constant pursuit of material purchasing or exciting moments or thrills, and that’s in and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with any of thing I just said. But the idea that you can go after that and, and, and have that be what’s defined as a meaningful and happy life, that’s the subtle trap because that’s the hedonic treadmill. The more you base your purpose and your happiness on that, the more you will need of that. And that’s the concept of a treadmill. You’re going to have to run faster and faster.

David B. Armstrong (Co-Host):

One of the tools that I know you use, and I have personally seen you introduce this and use this is the concept of the family meeting. And so let’s talk a bit more about family meetings. So what is a family meeting? Why is it important and what does a meeting agenda look like if somebody is going to sit down and try to conduct one of these? And why is setting that meeting agenda so important?

Richard Orlando (Guest):

Yeah, David and Jessica, as I hinted at this in our first episode where there’s different types of family meetings, I’ll give some important distinctions between them, but they’re all important in their own right. So I mentioned in the first episode that since my children were young, meaning five, six, seven years old, my wife and I would, and we still do it. By the way, they’re older now. Once a month on a Sunday evening, we sit down, My wife and I have maybe an agenda and a must speak about the importance of an agenda. But what younger children, we might have a point or two we want to talk about or read something that we think is. Represents our values and asks them to weigh in and share what they’re thinking, what questions they have, and so on and so forth. I’ll share one personal anecdote. When my daughter was about to have two daughters, but the younger one, she one time said to me in a family meeting, she said, Dad, you always tell me how important it is for me to grow into a strong woman, but you won’t let me bike ride around the neighborhood. And I said, Oh, my gosh, you’re right, honey. Like it took away her independent feeling at her age. Now we live in a safe neighborhood. My fear as a parent went beyond what it needed to. And I learned from my young lady a very simple way of just in that kind of informality with young children is so powerful and even informality with older children. So that’s one type of family meeting. When they were younger, we talk about the concepts of with through piggy banks of investing, donating, giving back, spending. So we talked about it age appropriate ways, also financial concepts. And then there’s another type of family meeting which is around the dining room table or at the dinner table, whatever it is, and just talking about life or talking about what they’re grateful for or talking about who they might want to help in their community as a family, where they want to volunteer their time. That’s a family meeting, too. In our training with advisors, as you know in your firm notes, we also equip advisors to host family meetings. So whether we’re invited to do it or a firm like yours is doing it, those meetings are a little bit more formal in the sense of there’s a process around it. We happen to have a tensed up process which we implement as well as, as, you know, give to you all to implement. But here’s what’s somewhat different and more formal about it. It’s really to yes, possibly address some of the we’ll call it the wealth financial side terms of financial education and things like that. But it’s also heavily focused on the business of being family. How do we and how do advisors how does your firm does rhetorical, of course, and is how do we help prepare the family for their assets in addition to preparing the assets for the family? So we really see family meetings, sometimes they call family gatherings, sometimes they call family retreats, but ultimately it’s helping the family prepare themselves for the financial resources. In some ways, you can think about the five points we covered in the first episode. They’re manifested in some ways through a family meeting. How do we start to prepare the next generation? What do we communicate? When do we communicate it? Think of the meeting as a medium by which you’re doing that with your family. The meetings could range from a couple of hours addressing one or two topics. If it’s the first time the family’s coming together and the children are young, that’s probably a very solid family meeting. There’s also family meetings where lots of family members that could be family branches, and we’ve run family meetings where they’re two or three days and they’re more like a family retreat where there’s going to be formal time. There’s going to be guidance from a team like mine or an advisor team like yours guiding them through it, and then there’s going to be time. They’re just going to play and they’re going to have fun. All of those meetings are valuable because it helps the family stop for a moment, slow down their busy calendars, look at each other. Be intentional and communicate. And in communicating around not just anything, it’s not meant to be like a kumbaya session, but it is meant to say, okay, what? And this goes back to our process. Going into their family meeting. We like to have and we recommend to advisors, as you know, have a one on one conversation prior to that family meeting with every adult or young adult that’s going to be in that meeting and just find out what’s on their mind, What questions do they have? What do they proud about in their family? What would they like to learn about more? And by having those really, really straightforward, real conversations, you’re going to you meaning the person who wants to run the meeting or facilitate the meeting is going to learn so much. And what they learn thematically from all those conversations should be what drives and shapes the agenda, David. That is exactly where you want to build your agenda.

David B. Armstrong (Co-Host):

Have you seen success or failure in the facilitator being a member of the family versus somebody from outside the family? Because I know one of the things that you do with your business and encourage everybody to go look at your website and read more about this is you act regularly as a facilitator of these meetings, don’t you? And do you ever see it go wrong if somebody wants to try to do it themselves?

Richard Orlando (Guest):

So about seven years ago, we ran this family meeting for this family that had the vision of the matriarch and the patriarch was they they put this shared asset in a trust for the future generations to share. It was a place to go. And we helped at that time. Let’s call it three generations. We’re in the room with us and we help the family get clear on the purpose of that asset, which was very clear from the matriarch and patriarch, which was for their grandchildren to one day or for their grandchildren to have to continue to share, create shared experiences together, but speed that up three generations in that cousin’s generation lived in many different parts of the country, had varying interests in going to that one location. So now to your question, David, the cousins maintained we’ll call it the family meetings, but now two of the family members had reached out to us because they were now kind of caught in the middle of the family dynamic, which was some of us wanted to go there. Some of us followed through, some of us stayed organized, some of us communicated. And here’s would be an example where it might not make sense for a family member or family members to lead that process is if they do feel like now that there isn’t this collaborative effort by a majority of the family to move forward and have an alignment and a process around making decisions, because in that now it’s like a family business, in essence, that is you’re now wearing multiple hats, you’re wearing on the cousin, the brother and the uncle, whatever the family member is. And I’m also responsible for making decisions on how something should unfold in the shared asset. It doesn’t mean family members cannot do this. Some families will create what’s called a family committee. That is kind of, loosely voted in. And then they’re responsible for driving a process. And that could work. But in most cases, the benefit of having you or Jessica or my team or both of us together helping a family do this is they all get to sit on the same side of the table and they all get to learn together, talk together, make decisions together, allowing others to kind of facilitate the process. It’s the idea from the book E-Myth, which is get out of the business to work on the business. It gives the family a chance to get out of the family business. And I don’t mean that literally, although in many cases there might be a family business so that they could just get together to be family. And in being family, we frame it as two ways is how to help them be more productive as a family and help them be more cohesive as a family. And it’s sometimes just easier for them to sit back and let someone else guide and facilitate so that they can they can focus on that and not have to also focus on facilitating a process.

Jessica Gibbs (Co-Host):

So I like this idea that you’ve been talking about how there’s a gradient of family meetings and what does that look like? I mean, I’m thinking about analogy like scuba diving. You’re not going to just flip back off the boat and do a deep dive right away. You’re going to start in the pool and you’re going to learn the scuba gear and then you’re going to slowly get comfortable and then you’re going to be out there and buy the boat, and then eventually you’re going to learn how to go deeper dives with that in mind that even just having the simple conversations, that can be a very successful meeting. Can you talk a little bit more about just giving people ideas about what could be agenda ideas for a family meeting? I heard what you said about those simple dinnertime conversations, but if you’re looking to kick it up to the next level, looking to have this type of dedicated, agenda driven family meeting that we’re talking about, what are some agenda items that people could consider.

Richard Orlando (Guest):

Very common for initial, let’s call it initial set of the first time, the families having a meeting in the way we’re describing it, commonly, it is about what are the shared values of the family, what financial education might be needed for family members. Again, going back to the process we teach and we use, you want to have these one on one conversations ahead of time so you better. The process is consistent, but the customization of where the family’s at is really important because that goes back to the agenda question and I’ll give you more examples of what’s on the agenda, is that the agenda should be speaking to where that family’s at today. We want to have them reach success for where they’re at today. We don’t cookie cut an agenda onto people because families are at different places. There are different ages, they’re at different levels of transparency and so on. Values, some level of financial education or awareness, philanthropy of some kind. It could be very, very basic. On what does that even mean to what are we going to do together during the holidays at the end of the year? Who are we going to help? Where are we going to volunteer? Another one is, are there any decisions that are near term to the family that they might need to make? So that could be philanthropy related topic. It could be a vacation they’re going to have. What might they want to accomplish on a vacation? Who’s paying for the vacation? Grandchildren invited, things like that. Sometimes it’s important. We’re usually asked for this is some kind of sense of what are other families doing. So when we are part of these meetings, we might start with a few stories of laying out, quote, what are best practices. So recently we actually lost two or three family meetings we ran in the last month. We talked a little bit about one of the dynasty families, what worked for them and what didn’t work for them, what practices that they maintain. The Rockefellers, for example, seven generations later, in their case, philanthropy is the major vehicle of keeping. I think it’s what they say. My data might be off here, but I think there’s 250 family members and 170 heirs or something like that, but they had sold their Standard Oil business and they actually thought that was one of the benefits. And now the family stays connected more through philanthropy. But they also talked about in that meeting family meetings, I’m sorry, in the article or that research I did on the Rockefellers, one of their best practices this came from their voice was having intentional family meetings. That was another way to keep the family connected. So the agenda items around, like I said, best practices, philanthropy, financial IQ, values and vision, those would be some of the clear starting foundational pieces for the family as they venture forward. And we do recommend that families have at least an annual family retreat or family meeting so that they can maintain this ritual not only for the present generations, but for future generations, because as the grandchildren get older, then they get invited into the meeting and then you perpetuate that thing that keeps the whole family connected.

Jessica Gibbs (Co-Host):

So I have one more question about family meetings. You mentioned kids. Grandkids are involved. What’s your take on if you have older kids who are married and bringing in their spouses to these family meetings?

Richard Orlando (Guest):

I could tell you have a lot of good experience, Jessica. You’re asking all the right questions. It’s a very common point in our family meeting process is who gets invited to the family meeting, however short or long it is. So fortunately, and it’s one of the services we love to be part of it is preparing and facilitating family meetings, so we’ve gotten to do quite a bit of that. I’d say roughly 50% of families are now the in-laws are in the married. In the end, we’re all one family. Bring them in. But about 50% or not with they’re not sure what they’re about to embark on. And so there’s still some privacy issues. There’s a little bit of just the unknown, maybe the married ends, there’s even some question marks about them. So our process is to, as part of our one on ones, if not just starting with whoever we’re connected to first, the matriarch, the patriarch, whoever it is initially is to ask, what is your take on the Marilyn’s being part of the meeting or the significant others? Sometimes it’s just significant others that are not formally even married. If there’s enough hesitation, even if it’s innocent, meaning I’m not ready. I don’t know what we’re about to talk about yet. It’s our first family meeting. We have two recommendations. One is sometimes will create a family meeting agenda where at the end of the agenda, let’s say it’s from 1 to 4. We’ll then encourage the family to have dinner together and then bring the married in with a significant others to the dinner. So there isn’t this like left out altogether piece. The other recommendation we have is maybe it’s not possible geographically. The meeting is not going to be where all the family members can easily get to, or there’s you have to watch the children and there’s not a nanny or whatever it is. The other spouse has to stay home or significant other has to stay home. As we encourage the family in that meeting, especially towards the end, to say, okay, was there anything in this meeting that needs to be kept private and therefore what needs to be proactively message back to the those that are not in the room? Because what we don’t want to do is unintentionally create an issue between those not in the room and the family members that are like, I thought you loved me. I thought your family accepted me. Why am I not in that room? So preparing them to say things like, Hey, we didn’t know what we were in for, there’s nothing that we talked about that’s private. I learned for the first time that mom and Dad have intentions about this foundation, that it’s going to include us one day. So whatever it is, we’d like to have them proactively agree to an update to the spouses not in the room. And part of that message, which is. 100% of the time. Is that true? Meaning is that over time, those spouses or those married ends will be invited into the process. But we don’t leave that to chance because we don’t want to unintentionally create that kind of dynamic.

Jessica Gibbs (Co-Host):

That’s great. So let’s try to shift gears and I want to delve deeper into something that we started talking about on the last episode, and that’s gifting to kids. So gifting them money for, as we talked about in the first episode, it can be for a lot of different purposes. When are there opportunities to think about gifting? Because I think that’s something that I often encounter in talking to our clients is people are like, okay, that sounds good. When do I do that? How do I do that? How do I think about this?

Richard Orlando (Guest):

Just for the sake of the audience, as you and David and your firm are experts in this. There’s literally gifting, which has a tax connection to it. And then if I could frame it a little more generally, making assets available, because you can make assets available without formally using an estate planning strategy or as you know, an exclusion gift could be part of the tax estate planning strategy. So let’s just talk broadly about making assets available, whether you do it through a very intentional tax strategy or estate planning strategy or not. I think you’re right. We touched on some of this. I think the classic place as we see it and is a real great opportunity for the generations involved or the people that family members or loved ones that’s involved. We talked about college is one of those. I think that’s one of the first big for some families private school, which could have started at kindergarten and went all the way through high school and a lot of money invested there. But let’s just say that when that rising generation, that next gen family member is a little bit more conscious of the fact that they’re going to college and not paying for it, that’s a window where money has become available. Money has become available for luxurious vacations for many years, for example. But I think that college point to echo some of what we talked about in the first episode is a great opportunity to not just to use it to talk about whether our children need to or not. Do we want them to work at all during the college years and or maybe they’re involved in a sport or a hobby and school. Maybe we don’t want them to be distracted because they’re great students, or between the sport and the school, they have no time. But even thinking proactively, do we want them to work at all? Do we want them to pay for any of their schooling? I heard one story where the person went to college and he was a bit upset that the family did not pay for the college because he knew enough to know that his family could afford it. Anyway, the story goes that he graduated, called his parents and said, I graduated. He took out loans, he did everything he could, and the parents said, Congratulations, we want to take you out to dinner. Took him out to dinner and gave him a check for the entire college education because they wanted him to learn to pay for his own schooling. Now, I’ve never met another family that’s done anything like that, but you can think about how creative you could be with even making the decision to pay for school. Most parents will have the resources, will pay for school. The next opportunity is after that. Are we buying the children a house? A lot of families I work with, some of their children are not in what we’ll call at least upfront, obvious money producing conventional jobs like singer, actor, writer. And they want to live in New York City because or Los Angeles, whatever it may be, lots of families we’ve served have that situation. Or DC, whatever it may be. And in many cases they will supplement that lifestyle because they feel like that’s an investment into their children’s lives. It’s a matter of fact. That’s what we encourage them to proactively message. This is a way for Mom and I or Dad and I to continue to invest in your life. So as long as you’re working and we’re seeing the effort will support this. So that would be another opportunity. Some families just outrightly buy a house and that might be premature or they might buy a house in the trust that is set aside already for that child and communicate that this is owned by the trust, which in essence, in some ways is almost like a prepayment of their inheritance because it’s in the trust of the child. So those are decision points. I forgot one in the first episode. I thinking about it. Now the other place to talk, which is kind of a catalyst for this conversation, is does the family have the belief in or the expectation that there’s going to be prenups? Because as you know, if there’s prenups, then there’s an obligation to make certain amount of assets revealed. You have to let the other party and their attorney, their legal representation, know what assets are at stake. So there’s a forced transparency, at least on whatever portion of assets. So you want to help encourage. That would be another moment where you want to have these conversations and preparing them for that. Not surprising them in the last moment if you don’t have to. And just a couple of more classic ones are maybe the family’s very entrepreneurial, whether they are or not. Maybe the next generation is. And is their assets available to be borrowed or invested by the family? And we talked about the idea of a family bank. Or I’ll add another idea is called patient capital. Maybe the family is going to be easier to borrow against than a bank, or the bank would not lend the money for the venture. But the family really believes in entrepreneurship, and as long as whatever criteria they have set up to get access to the family bank or maybe. Pre access to an intended inheritance. That would be another important decision making in the gifting side is to do those kinds of examples are very, very common.

Jessica Gibbs (Co-Host):

Yeah, it all kind of ties back to again what is the purpose of your wealth? I mean, if the purpose is higher education or in graduate school or other non nontraditional education paths might be something that you do gifting around or as you said, if it’s we purpose of our wealth, what we believe in is starting businesses and giving money, seed money for someone who is starting a business. I mean I think that’s yeah. Again those purpose around your wealth having those conversations really ironing that out, that can then inform those gifting and it could be or could not be tied to these core life stages that you’re talking about.

Richard Orlando (Guest):

Exactly. That was well said. And that goes to why we thought it with the idea of the purpose. It’s an evolving process, but the more clear you are along the way, then everyone has some manage expectations on how and then know how to plan accordingly. I’m reminded of a family meeting we ran, I think it was the end of January. And we did the family meeting process, as we always do. We were asked to come in. Family had a lot of resources and they never met in a family meeting in any formal way, in the way we started to talk about it. Not that they haven’t talked or sat around at a dinner table or been on fun vacations together, but they really didn’t do any of the things as intensely as we’ve been talking about it. To your credit, that’s why we’re doing this podcast and this is like definition. I think as an example of success of a family meeting, we coached the parents on where they want to go with transparency or not go. We did a one on ones. In this case, the married ends were in the room. No one had a concern about the married ends at all, or even just a pause, and there was nothing like that. And remember, the agenda is supposed to represent their agenda. Not a person’s agenda, not the Matriarch’s agenda, not the Patriarch’s agenda. It should be the family agenda. And our job and your job is to help that family experience success together. And so we did the process and we’re confident in our process. We’ve been doing it a long time, but you don’t always know what’s going to happen. You don’t know what’s going to work best until you’re in the meeting. And here’s a perfect example. Towards the end of the meeting, after we covered topics like what is the intended legacy was the vision for our family, the purpose of our philanthropy, and so on. One of the adult family members, the next generation said to the dad. I just learned more in 15 minutes by what you shared than I learned in the last 15 years. And she was being not critical. We all were doing is helping them put their story together and do it in a wise way. And that’s a success. And even the spouse, the wife in this case, the matriarch who’s there side by side, the husband and wife are a team. She goes, I learned more about what’s going on in this place that we have as a family. But that quote, my team, those one virtually dialed in and two of us in the room, we looked at each other and just smiled like happiness. Like, yeah, we’re helping them achieve their objectives. That adult in the next generation said it all. I learned more in 15 minutes and I learned in the last 15 years. And this is a loving, high functioning family.

David B. Armstrong (Co-Host):

What about the idea of debt, credit cards? I specifically remember my parents really harping on me about establishing credit early and responsible credit when I was early in college, and then I went back to graduate school and I noticed that all these credit card companies are out there with get a free T-shirt, which really resonates with college kids for some reason. And you can, you know, sign up for this credit card to get a free T-shirt or something like that. Have you seen success or failures in using gifting in a way to help kids establish good credit early on as they’re learning how credit cards work and interest compounding interest and minimum payments?

Richard Orlando (Guest):

David and Jessica in your firm are much more of an expert in this understanding than I am. But yes, I think a point in practice and this goes to that what I’m going to call that minimum level of financial acumen or financial I.Q. that you want family members to have, which is what is credit? How do you affect credit? And should you have a credit card or start paying a bill to earn your credit score? I mean, this is I know you all know this way better than I do. So as a practice, I think that is an important practice. The questions that I see more practically, which could be which way do we go? Is I’ve seen well, I don’t know if I’ve seen everything, but we’ve seen a lot which families that we serve is sometimes they just have a credit card and it somehow magically gets paid. I don’t think that’s the best practice because the child who’s using the credit card of mom and dad are having no accountability to it or no sense of the things we talked about in this episode in the prior episode of Did I work for it? Like, it seems like money’s grown from trees, so I could just keep bringing up what I need. The debit card commonly we will see and then we will coach or recommend differently. And it’s still up to the family on how they want to do it because it’s their family and their values is sometimes I’ll just keep refunding or replenishing a debit card. Here’s why we think college is a great opportunity. Whether it’s do we want them to work, are we going to give them a credit card or are we going to fund a debit card? Because I think if most family members or most of the families we serve have enough resources to pay for it all, But we would recommend so that we get more of a real life connection in education to their children with these money concepts. It’s not only the values part, but I rather I think there’s more of an opportunity to teach by saying he said to me, Paying your bills or giving you $300 a week, I might say you are whatever the number is, you have 2000 this month. You have to use it and figure out how to use it to pay for your fund, pay for your meal plan and pay for your books or whatever it is, whatever those other criteria might be to spend money on this now is why you want to teach them. Budgeting really is a very practical connection to budgeting or credit, but just having the principle of I can keep charging or I can keep pulling from my debit account and money shows up all the time. I don’t think parents are maximizing the teaching and growth opportunity. It’s still making them. Remember I said in the first episode, I believe use these questions to guide our decisions as parents. Are we making them more competent or are we making them more dependent on us? And I think if you just use those kinds of guidelines, it’ll help us make wiser decisions on these very practical decisions of college work, buying a home and so on and so forth, irrespective of the amount of assets we might have as a family.

David B. Armstrong (Co-Host):

Maybe that’s a great lead into a next. The question I have here, too, that I think is really valuable for listeners to understand, too, is. What’s the benefit of doing the legacy planning in conjunction with your wealth manager? Now, I know that sounds like a leading question. I get it. I don’t really mean it as a leading question. I truly want to hear what the benefits that you’ve seen in your experience from the other side of the table. Because I believe there are benefits, but I’m not very unbiased on that topic, so I have to disclose that. Right. But maybe you could share some vignettes or something about the benefits there.

Richard Orlando (Guest):

So, David, when work of many of the invitations we have to serve families comes through their advisor firms, and in all of those cases, we are understanding at legacy capitals. It’s your clients, it’s your firm’s clients. And we’re here as an extension of your team to provide certain value to your clients. So we have a lot of experience doing that. So I’m going to be less biased than you and say we think it is so good for the advisor firm to be in the process with the family because it enables not only you as a firm to build relationships across the family tree and therefore provide more of your value. But it’s really good for the family too, because if the intentions are that there’s going to be wealth, move through the generations. From the family perspective, then isn’t that a great opportunity to connect my family to the firm because of untrusting you today and your knowing what our intentions are? And you’re getting to know my prized people in my life, my loved ones. Then I would want us to work in harmony across my family’s generations with your firms generations and you knowing and having the expertise, literally in this case, your firm have any expertise on. I’m sure there’s a lot of people expertise, but you clearly have the expertise on the I’ll call it the technical side of wealth management and all that goes with those kinds of family office services. I think there’s a great connection there for the obvious reasons, the family side, your firm side. But it’s that integration of preparing the assets for the family and preparing the family for their assets. For the families that come to us who don’t come through an adviser referral, they just come to us. We serve families that are that have no advisers attached. Any time a more technical decision is needed or an investment decisions needed, tax decisions needed, a philanthropic vehicle is needed. Our firm does none of that. We don’t do anything on the technical aspects of one’s financial resources. So even in the case of where a family might come to us without their family office or their wealth management firm attached, any time a need to provide education around philanthropy or set up a foundation or bring the next generation in on an investment account, we’re encouraging them to go back to their advisor firms to do that. So I understand your bias in it, but I also think a firm like yours cares about serving the whole family, which is what we call our training for advisors, whole family advising when that relationship is built genuinely across the family tree and therefore the tree of your wealth management firm. I think it’s a great it’s a great relationship.

David B. Armstrong (Co-Host):

Yeah, there’s a conduit there between those two statements that you’ve said a few times, which is preparing the family for the assets and preparing the assets for the family. There’s a conduit between those two things, and I think it is the process that a team of people who are providing clients with advice and we’ll go off on a tangent too much, but really that’s the product of a wealth manager. It’s the advice, right? It’s Hey, I like your opinion on things. That translates into good advice for me. That’s the value proposition. That’s what I’m retainer wealth manager for, and that’s where the conduit is between those two things. And that process has to be you want to uncover the experience that you want that family to have, whether it’s the matriarch, patriarch, or the entire family uncovering that experience. Okay. Once you do that, you’ve got to then assess and model. How will that affect their overall wealth plan? And then once you figure that out, then it’s what needs to happen to turn that into reality. And that’s the conduit between those two statements that you like to say, because they don’t connect in reality like they do in a sentence. There has to be that intermediary there that’s going to look at that and say, well, that’s a great idea and you can do it, or that’s a great idea, but you’re going to have to compromise on some other things in order to make that happen or that destroys your plan. You can’t really do that. Most people that we’re talking to, you don’t have destructive plans for their wealth, but it could be something crazy that comes up. But that’s why our experience has been when there is experts working in concert with each other. To uncover the experience that the family wants, figuring out how it’s going to affect their plan, and then figuring out how to make it a reality that includes more than just a wealth manager. It includes people like you, includes, trust me, state attorneys, it includes CPAs. Could include other lawyers, too, if there’s an M&A transaction or anything in there like that. And so it’s never one person, it’s never the wealth management team. It’s everybody working together to the extent that they’re all talking together and know the client’s desires for the experience that they want to have when they’re all working together. And the word you is really early on transparency. And that transparency exists not only across the family but across the whole team that’s giving them advice. I think that’s the recipe for success for anybody who is looking at a situation like this with their family and saying, how do I start to tackle this whole issue of setting a family meeting, setting the agenda? How do we gift to the kids? How do we have a conversation around the purpose and in a sort of a inclusionary statement there? But I think that these past two episodes that we’ve recorded with you have been fantastic in framing some of those things in a way that somebody who’s struggling with this was somebody who maybe didn’t even know that they should be doing this and are now thinking she’s really maybe I should do that. I think this has been very helpful and I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your experiences, vignettes and a wealth of knowledge with our listeners. And I think this has been a great two part series here. And Jessica, I know you probably want to conclude with a question here.

Jessica Gibbs (Co-Host):

Not with the question, but a few more resources, because I know this is a deep and complex conversation we’ve been having. I mean, that’s why we had two episodes on it. But for those that are looking for more riches, book is called Legacy The Hidden Keys to Optimizing Your Family Wealth Decisions and his firm Legacy Capitals can facilitate family meetings, provide one on one coaching, as Rich has talked about. If you’re not at that level yet, but you still want some resources, some additional support, I do want to shout out they have some great online courses and there’s two in particular that I want to highlight for parents. The first is the financial parenting program for parents of school aged kids, and the second is the leading generation program, which delves deeper into helping parents talk about wealth and preparing kids for the opportunities and responsibilities of while. So again, take a look at the website Legacy capitals and you’ll find those courses there. So thank you so much for joining us.

Richard Orlando (Guest):

Well, thank you. It’s been a very valuable conversation and I’m glad to be partnered with you. And if anyone’s interested, here’s your podcast. They can reach out to you all. And if they’re your clients and we can connect that way, but they can reach us directly. But thank you for and to your credit again, for bringing this through a podcast to the people you’re serving.

David B. Armstrong (Co-Host):

Thanks. Great to have you on, Rich.

OFF THE WALL is a podcast for business professionals and high-net-worth investors who want to build wealth with purpose. A little bit Wall Street, a little bit off-the-wall; it’s your go-to for straightforward, unfiltered wealth advice on topics that founders, business owners, and executives care about.