Surveillance

Tax Screw-Ups and People Problems: Experts Reveal Biggest Blunders of Rich Families

There’s no single way to handle massive wealth. There are, however, some common mistakes to learn from.

Photographer: Viktor_Gladkov/iStockphoto
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A famous line in an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story declares that the very rich are different from you and me. The obvious difference: While the 99.9 percent strive to make a living, the 0.1 percent are working out what to do with the wealth they already have. Preserving and investing and donating and spending wealth is more than a full-time job and requires multiple types of expertise. Pitfalls abound, especially within families. Speak to a few family office experts, and you’ll hear the phrase “When you’ve seen one family office, you’ve seen one family office.” In other words, there’s no uniform method for handling great wealth. But press them on common errors, and they have a lot to say about patterns that trip up even those with the best intentions. In these pages a group of professionals from family offices, investment managers, estate planners, art advisers, and other disciplines describe mistakes they’ve seen. Fitzgerald wrote that there are “no types, no plurals.” But it turns out there are some lessons we can all learn.

Avy Stein
Co-Founder Cresset Capital Management