Estate Advisor’s Role in Family Wealth Planning

The Le Van Company has recently posted on its website an article entitled Family Mission Statements: What Estate Advisors Need to Know. This article was also published in the March 2008 issue of the Estate Planning magazine.

According to this article:

Inevitably, boomers will enlist other estate planning advisors to support healthy wealth objectives, to recommend or evaluate a myriad of healthy wealth resources and resource persons[.]*** As a first step toward healthy wealth, wealthy families are counseled to draft a “family mission statement”. What is the estate advisor’s role in the drafting process?***

[O]rganizing should begin with the family’s relational estate, its most valuable nonfinancial asset. The relational estate rests on three fundamental building blocks: genetics, family history and family heritage[.]***

The goal of mission statements is to help keep the peace in affluent families. By agreeing on a basic set of principles, families hope to avoid lawsuits between relatives about money. They also hope to draw up moral guides for future generations, so that kids and grandkids will inherit values as well as wealth.***