Instead, wealthy families should quantify success based on what they’re trying to accomplish and do with their wealth.
Success should be measured against how you achieve your goals and live your values, rather than just having a portfolio benchmarked to an artificial number.
Keith Bloomfield
CEO
Forbes Family Trust
The most attractive investment opportunities are often complex, and realizing value requires patience, liquidity management, and specialized advisers. The world’s most prominent families may have all of those in spades, but without a sophisticated family office to orchestrate all of those, they are likely to see subpar results. The pitfall for some families, therefore, is not devoting attention to building the family office, which enables it to arrange the other components to work together optimally.
Kris Putnam-Walkerly
President
Putnam Consulting Group
A common problem among wealthy families seeking to be charitable is that they come up with the solution without doing their homework to understand the true needs and the best ways to meet those needs.
Wealthy families and individuals are likely not in frequent contact with the people they are trying to help and often make assumptions about what they need. As a donor, if you don’t take time to understand what the underlying problems are, you aren’t going to come up with solutions to solve them.
They start their own nonprofit to meet the need, instead of identifying the existing resources in the community and ways that their funding could strengthen and expand those resources.
Matthew Weatherley-White
Co-Founder and Impact Investing Specialist
Caprock Group
There’s almost a predisposition to falling in love with mission-driven impact investments like addressing climate change, or food deserts, or the unbanked. You so want the entrepreneur to succeed that you’re unintentionally willing to ignore negative variables in due diligence, for example. It’s easier to be dispassionate with investments that aren’t philosophically aligned with what you see as your mission in the world.