He cited a study that found 70 percent of family wealth transfers fail, mostly due to an inadequate preparation of heirs to handle an inheritance and a lack of trust and poor communication among family members. Ascent, whose target clients have at least $50 million in net worth, also has psychologists on staff to help family members work on communication skills and make decisions about wealth transfer. McNeill will work with them as a part of a team in the area of wealth impact planning.
“I spent many years teaching and have assigned many students autobiographies,” said McNeill, who taught history “off and on” for about 13 years at Berkeley, the University of the Pacific, Ohlone College and the Academy of Art University. “I have seen how it links them directly to the past. It empowers them.”
McNeill, who was born in Massachusetts but raised in Southern California, said teaching is going to be part of her new duties.
In addition to family histories and retreats, McNeill is also working on other history-related projects. For instance, she is creating a tool that uses history as an icebreaker at a women’s leadership and legacy retreat U.S. Bank is hosting in Santa Barbara.
McNeill says she has loves history since she was as a child travelling with her family to national parks across the country. She also said her seventh-grade European history teacher’s love of history was “infectious.”
McNeill has also worked as a historian at Carey & Co., Inc., an architectural firm in San Francisco, and as a consultant to Landmarks California. She is a director on the Landmark Heritage Foundation Board and earned several honors and awards, including a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her biography of Julia Morgan, architect for the Hearst family.
U.S. Bank created Ascent about two years ago to provide comprehensive wealth management services, including multigenerational wealth planning, to ultra-high-net-worth clients. Ascent currently has offices in Cincinnati, Denver, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Seattle.