“We have reengineered estate and inheritance planning to foster family well-being - i.e., thriving in multiple domains of life.”
Family Wealth and Inheritance services
Envision moving beyond such questions as “Should I stop giving money to my adult child?” Instead imagine asking: “How can I best uncover, understand and support my child’s strengths and virtues? How can I truly believe and trust in my child’s ability to flourish?”
Envision family members collaborating to inspire each other, not to control each other. Envision family members engaging with one another on a deeper basis, reaching all the domains of well-being, rather than merely superficial.
Envision an inheritance plan that is positive, collaborative and inspirational, a plan that intentionally engages with research and empirical data to inform specific actions. For example, imagine a family that, incrementally and over time, recognizes needs and benefits to improving family members’ well-being, invests resources to change, visualizes a better end result and is pulled into a brighter future, assesses progress, adjusts the strategy over time, and honestly recognizes past (and future) mistakes and missteps and learns from them.
Envision the family’s lawyers, accountants, and financial advisors all contributing towards advancing the family members’ well-being. They will continue protecting the family’s wealth from loss to creditors, taxes and investment declines but do so guided by the central purpose is to improve the lives and well-being of each family member.
We help clients design their wealth and inheritance planning to be impactful for them and their loved ones, starting immediately and over the arc of their life. Every person leaves behind an inheritance and legacy. Whether that is family history, traditions, values, money, assets and businesses, it has the potential to be positive and inspiring to the beneficiaries. But it is not always automatically so.
Well-Being Trusts
We believe it is past time to recast the principal purpose of trusts to be for improving beneficiary well-being. While we continue to design trusts to save taxes and protect wealth from creditors and other risks, we are now envisioning trust as instruments of well-being. In this new paradigm of estate planning, many of the traditional ideas need updating.
A Well-Being Trust is an instrument that threads the intentional goals and actions of one’s inheritance plan to increase beneficiary well-being. It could, for example, ensure funding for a well-being foundational level of support that is consistent with the family’s well-being goals – i.e., good housing in a community that is inclusive, empowered, resilient, and safe; having access to quality healthcare; and being well-educated and skilled. The trust might also facilitate actions and behaviors that lead to better relationships, more meaning and flourishing. Being a positive emotional experience (for both trust beneficiaries and the creator) is a core feature of the Well-Being Trust.
Each Well-being Trust is individually designed with substantial input from the creator. Creating a trust that is positive and transformational takes time and effort, but the potential reward is far beyond financial gain. We start with these ten foundational suggestions for a Well-Being Trust:
Take responsibility and ownership of increasing well-being
Be positive
Eliminate negative language and/or incentive language
Promote autonomy, self-efficacy and master of any kind
Fund an objective well-being baseline of support
Spend positively
Connect philanthropy to well-being
Promote transparency, by eliminating silent trusts – i.e. support a shift in control by requiring trust information be distributed and explained
Assess well-being and adjust strategy over time
Evaluate trustee performance by beneficiary well-being improvement
Family Meetings, Retreats and Workshops3
For existing clients we are facilitating family meetings, retreats and workshops. We bring the traditional notions of estate planning (e.g. tax savings and protecting asset from unanticipated creditors and other risks) together with well-being theory. Through a well-being lens, the timing and purpose of inheritance comes into focus. Wealth and inheritance planning becomes intentional and purposeful, and perhaps even more importantly it becomes positive and inspiring. In this setting, we help families craft practical and thoughtful approaches which can be documented in their legal instruments such as Well-Being Trusts.
Family Well-Being Framework
We also assist existing clients craft a family well-being framework.
A well-being framework provides families with a positive platform to incrementally and over time improve family members’ lives. It integrates family wealth and inheritance. Rather than focusing exclusively on family governance, dynamics, legacy, mission statements, charity, estate planning, and so on, a well-being framework realigns these elements within the family’s primary intention of supporting members’ well-being and flourishing.
The framework is crafted by the family based on the priorities of its members in the various domains of well-being. For each domain, families will decide on their short and long-term goals, and budget to accomplish those goals. For example, in the physical well-being domain, start by defining the foundational level of well-being, such as ensuring that all family members have (i) quality healthcare coverage coupled with actual access to providers, (ii) access to high quality food (i.e., are able to shop for organic food without feeling stressed), (iii) housing in a resilient and safe community that provides peace of mind, and (iv) access to health clubs and exercise equipment.4 Fundamentally, a well-being framework should be designed to inspire growth.
To learn more about FKL family wealth and inheritance services, contact Richard Franklin (202.495.2677) or your FKL attorney.
1 Seligman, THE HOPE CIRCUIT, pp. 390 – 391 (Hachette Book Group 2018).
2 See Franklin & Tordini, Wealth and Well-Being - What Wealthy Families Can Learn from Sovereign Government Policies and Measuring Human Progress, Bloomberg Estates, Gifts and Trusts Journal, Vol. 46, Number 3 (May 13, 2021).
3 For these services, additional clients disclosures and waivers are required concerning the heightened potential for conflicts of interest and confidential information being disclosed.