Today, with the increasing recognition of the importance of better relationships between advisor and client, and bolstered by numerous studies and practical experience validating the significant inheritance failure rate, there is general agreement among professionals that there are three, not two, components required for successful multi-generational planning.
The three components of successful multi-generational planning are distinct and separate in some ways, but when they are designed to work together, they can pave the road to family success for generations. Here is a summary description of each component:
Financial Planning: Prepares and protects your assets during your lifetime.
Estate Planning: Prepares your assets for your family.
Heritage Design: Prepares your family to receive their inheritance (which includes far more than just your assets).
Consider this question: how far will the financial and /or estate planning that you have done to date take your family towards family harmony, individual accomplishment, community involvement, etc., that you likely envision when you look into the future?
“Most people have made no such provision as part of their planning. Their financial and estate planning will pass money and assets to future generations, but not the tools, training or mentoring to effectively use those assets to live full, productive lives.”
Money is an extraordinarily powerful tool – that, like fire, can be a wonderful servant or a terrible master. Ironically, the better you are prepared with your financial and estate planning, the more important it is that you prepare your family for the inheritances (financial and familial) that they will receive.
When it comes to completing your financial planning, there are different processes used by financial and investment advisors, CPAs, CFPs, and others to help determine which tools, strategies, products, and services can best prepare and protect your assets during your lifetime. Similarly, there are processes that those same advisors and estate planning attorneys use to help you determine which estate planning tools and strategies can best prepare and pass your assets to your inheritors. To add the 3rd component, Heritage Design, to the planning mix trained and certified professional advisors use The Heritage Process™. They help guide clients to identify, articulate, and pass on their values, stories, and life lessons along with preparing the family to harmoniously make decisions and resolve upsets together. The objective of heritage design is simple: to prepare each member of the family to successfully receive, protect and grow their financial and familial inheritances.
Familial inheritances are different for every person, and they are unique to every family. With Heritage Design, the advisor helps people to ‘discover,’ articulate, and share the things that matter most to them, and then to use that information as the foundation for all of their financial and estate planning. Through Heritage Design, people can prepare their family to get together, play together, work together, and support one another so that each family member can have the opportunity to live a fulfilled life.
Heritage Design was developed to help families and individuals achieve their dreams today, and across generations. It has been experienced by families with estates ranging from a few hundred thousand to many billions of dollars because the principles of heritage design have nothing to do with money. They apply to people at all income and asset levels.
When family comes first, all things are possible. When family is neglected, more than money withers and dies. Relationships do, too. Heritage Design helps to put family first– and keep it there.
