Creating portfolios customized to a family’s unique investment goals and risk tolerance requires ingenuity and flexible thinking. However, the execution of risk management should be more systematic, and families and their advisors should consider four components: strategic risk, implementation risk, portfolio monitoring, and communication.
Consistently revisiting potential liquidity risk is important work for family investors. To manage liquidity risk, families should employ best practices, monitoring illiquid investments, spending needs, and currency considerations. By doing so, they can guard against unanticipated stressors and remain on track to achieve their investment goals.
For families of significant wealth, complexity is a natural byproduct of a well-managed portfolio, but there is such a thing as overcomplexity. This paper discusses a range of best practices to consider if and when a portfolio is encountering sluggishness, inefficiency, or ambiguity.
Costs are an important consideration when devising an overall wealth management strategy. Each family’s wealth management cost formula is different. Various tools and insights are available to help them make informed decisions about how to meet their unique service requirements and investment goals at a reasonable cost.
Most families of significant wealth inevitably grapple with intergenerational wealth transitions. While shifting the responsibility for a family’s long-term financial health can be a challenging endeavor, generational transfers are also an opportunity for families to take a fresh look at their financial goals. With this in mind, we advocate a three-part framework for families seeking to integrate members of the next generation into the wealth management process, which focuses on engagement, education, and empowerment.
Investment governance plays a critical role in the ability of families with substantial wealth to define their financial objectives and formulate a strategy for a diversified portfolio. This paper provides an overview of investment governance that families can use in the development of their own investment decision-making framework.
As next gen investors and principal wealth owners think about meeting both near- and long-term wealth management challenges, they should consider three core pillars of building a lasting family legacy: shared values, strong wealth governance, and a clear, long-term investment policy.
In the second piece of our two-part series on philanthropy and impact investing, we take a closer look at portfolio implementation best practices for families. In doing so, we outline how families may wish to identify opportunities within sustainable and impact investing (SII) themes. We discuss the broad opportunity set, how to construct and then actively manage an investment portfolio of these strategies, and why families are well-positioned to deploy capital in this space.
In engaging with our family clients around the world, we are often asked for views on how to think about philanthropy versus impact investing and how to best implement a socially and/or environmentally impactful investment strategy. Common themes transcend these topics, but each is distinct, and we will outline our perspective in a two-part series. In this first piece, we discuss some of the motivations behind philanthropy and we review how philanthropy relates to impact investing.
As entrepreneurs know well, the process of creating and managing a successful business is complex and requires great skill, insight, and hard work. Successful management of significant wealth requires similar attributes; however, not all the characteristics fundamental to entrepreneurial success translate to effective portfolio management. This paper presents five recommendations for those looking to build an investment framework that can be as successful and personally rewarding as building a business.