Most wealth planning begins with an unspoken objective - maximize the family's after-tax wealth. We pursue it with tax-efficient structures, long holding…
Most wealth planning begins with an unspoken objective - maximize the family's after-tax wealth. We pursue it with tax-efficient structures, long holding periods, higher-return investments, entities, trusts, and professional management. Our recommendations usually lead to more wealth. To handle all of this planning and compliance, each family must also build a family wealth system - an enterprise that consumes time, expertise, administration, and professional infrastructure for as long as the family holds the assets.
In my upcoming presentation at Notre Dame, I define the family's wealth system as the portfolio together with everything required to own and maintain it: the entities and trusts, the debt and contractual obligations, the lawyers, accountants, investment advisors, trustees, managers and employees, the tax returns and reporting systems, and the governance and family decisions that recur year after year. The family does not merely inherit the value produced by that system. It inherits the obligation to keep the system running.
That system is not created because of its assets. It is largely a product of the person who built it - of how that person accumulates, spends, structures and transfers wealth.
Some families want the life created by the wealth system they inherit. Others do not want to live that way, and do not want their children to inherit it either.
I want to compare two ways of living with wealth. One is built around complex assets and the system required to maintain them, and one built around simpler assets requiring far less administration. For many families, selling the complex assets, paying the tax, and accepting a lower expected return produces the better result: a simpler life during the wealth creator's lifetime, and a simpler inheritance after death. My presentation - and this series - is about making that choice deliberately - including potentially selling assets and paying a lot of tax, which almost no advisor recommends.
Part of Wealth Machine, a Secret Art of Planning series.
I’ll be discussing these ideas at the upcoming Notre Dame Tax & Estate Planning Institute, October 28–30, 2026.
The full paper, “They Shouldn't Inherit My Problems!”, will be available following my presentation in October.
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