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Inheritance

Shifting the Conversation Around Family Wealth — Opportunities for Each Generation

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As a long-time estate planning attorney, I saw a phenomenon early on in my career that impacted me greatly. I worked for a lawyer who had been in law practice more than 25 years, and he said that in the early days of his practice, his clients used to come to him to get help in ensuring that when they died their assets would go to their kids.

Fast forward 25 years, and those same clients were coming back to him to protect their assets FROM their kids.

I thought this was sort of funny, but didn’t think much of it until years later when I would begin to meet many of those “kids” who would one day inherent substantial assets from their parents and realize that these “kids” are adults who are living in various degrees of “disability” due to the way they and their parents are connecting (or not) around their future inheritance. It’s the classic “Family Wealth and inheritance gone wrong” we’re all probably familiar with to some degree.

Let me break it down a little bit more in case it isn’t totally clear:

Over the next 30 to 40 years, approximately $30 Trillion (with a T) will transfer from the remaining members of the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers to their heirs.  The oldest members of the Silent Generation are currently 92, the oldest of the Boomers are 71 and the youngest 53. Between these two generational cohorts, people over the age of 53 are holding the vast majority of our total wealth.

And that would seem obvious and natural given that they’ve had the time to earn income and accumulate wealth, but it’s actually a shift from the past in which “senior adults once had the highest poverty rates” according to this article on Neil Howe’s book the Fourth Turning.

On top of that, John Mauldin’s report on the Fourth Turning suggests we are currently in the midst of a societal existential crisis, “one in which society’s strongest institutions collapse (or are severely challenged and stressed) and national survival is in serious doubt.”

We can better understand what all of this means, and why it’s important that the vast majority of our world’s wealth is held by the senior generations, by looking at what’s occurred during prior iterations of Fourth Turnings, which are generational turnings of the wheel — the signing of the Declaration of Independence happened during a Fourth Turning, the start of the Civil War occurred during a Fourth Turning, the 1689 Glorious Revolution and the English defeat of the Spanish Armada, all Fourth Turnings —  that are as cyclical as the seasons.

Here’s the bottom line:

The vast majority of our wealth is being held by the senior generation, mostly
invested in old institutions, and we are in the midst of a crisis, in which
there is at least some likelihood that those institutions are about to crash and burn.

And, our junior generations, are in large part, not properly prepared to persuade (or inspire) their parents to shift their investments into alternative investment vehicles that could actually support the creation of the world we want to live in.

On top of that, the senior generations are living longer than ever, investing their resources in longevity, nursing homes, and $3.4 Trillion last year in healthcare costs across the population of the United States. According to this article in the Atlantic “Hundreds of billions of dollars each year are spent treating Americans who are in the last weeks, or days, of life.”

And, these holders of the wealth are not actively anxious to pass on what they’ve earned to the junior generation. In fact, it seems to be just the opposite. They want to hold onto it until they die, which will be too late, and the way I see it is that we have to do everything we can to free up these resources, and re-allocate them to be invested in the systems and structures that will create the world we want to live in.

Imagine what we could do if we were able to free up those resources, get them out of the stock market and the old institutions that are no longer serving, and re-allocate them into sustainable services, and regenerative practices and alternative energies, and other investments that served the greater good?

What if we could re-allocate those resources to the junior generation where they could be put to work innovatively, funding the solutions of the future world we need to create.

In order for that to happen, one major thing needs to take place, first and foremost:

The junior generation needs to step up, fully, and develop the trust in themselves that would be necessary to activate the resources their parents are holding so that the senior generation wants to move assets down to the junior generation during life, instead of waiting until their death.

This is no small feat.

Doing this will require the junior generation to work through some pretty big “projection fields” created by the senior generation. The seniors generation often cannot believe they have raised awesome kids who can be trusted to receive what they’ve created and take care of them, as they would want to be cared for.

And, in many cases, these projection fields aren’t false, but the real manifestation of unhealed wounding and conditioning passed on for many generations. Oftentimes, the junior generation is not yet trustworthy.

But, we can change this. And we must.  We need the junior generation to be resourced and funded.

There is a massive inter-generational divide that creates very little trust, and therefore a reality in which our juniors won’t inherit the resources for another 30 or more years, and at that point it could be too late.

On the individual level, our juniors themselves will be well beyond their creative, generative years, by then into their 60s and 70s, and, collectively it may actually be too late, as we are facing our own mass extinction if we don’t hurry up and get creative.

So, what can we each do?

Junior generation:  you can begin with an acknowledgement of why the senior generation might not trust you. In many cases, you have collapsed under the weight of your parents projected insecurities. And instead of seeing the pain of those projections as an opportunity to heal, you have taken them on as judgments and attacks you seem unable to recover from.

But, recover you can. And, in fact, you must. The unhealed wounds of the senior generation is your work to process. It may be that you are the first generation in your family to have the emotional and evolutional resource to actually do this healing work.

Your work is the work of forgiveness, compassion and understanding. Reconciliation. Resolve. Finding your adult self and allowing that part to re-parent the wounded inner child, so that you may operate from the remembrance of who you really are, why you are here and what’s yours to do.

From this place, you have the opportunity to inspire your parents to create with you, rather than waiting until their death to pass on your inheritance. 

This is your work to do, and you have everything you need to do this work, even if your parents seem as if they will never come along. It’s actually up to you, junior generation, to lead the way.

Senior generation: you can be open to being inspired. You can acknowledge your fear and be willing to see where your fears and worries may be creating the exact reality you say you do not want. You can remain in connection with the junior generation, as they work through the pieces they need to work though in order to build trust with you. And, you can agree to start looking at what you would need to be true in order to pass on your resources, including financial, intellectual, spiritual and human, now.

From this place, you have the opportunity to use that which you have gathered and that which you have learned to create even more during this lifetime — a real legacy + a discovery of the secret to vital aliveness for the rest of your life. 

When the junior and senior generations truly come together, there is not only nothing to be afraid of, there is the true possibility for a world that really does work for everyone. Each person fully utilized. Each person remains in full health until the very end of life. Elders can give generously and juniors can receive responsibly.

This is a world we can create together when we change the conversation around family wealth at each generation.

 

 

Money Dysmorphia

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For years, I chased prosperity. I built two million- dollar companies, wrote a best-selling book, was appearing regularly on television, had a house a half a block from the beach, the kids in private school…, the whole nine.

By anyone’s standards, I had made it.

I should have felt prosperous and abundant, but I didn’t.

I had a great business, and the ability to make all the money I could have possibly needed, and yet I was emotionally and financially bankrupt.

And it stemmed from a core belief I carried with me from childhood.

This core belief led me to make consistently bad decisions about how I used my time, my energy, and my attention—, resources I will never be able to get back.

Due to this core belief, I hurt relationships that will never recover. And, the truth is, I didn’t really know how to have relationships because the only thing I really thought about when it came to relationships was how much the relationship would cost me, or how much it would make me.

While I considered myself someone who cared about people, that caring was mostly trapped beneath a dis-ease of epic proportions that nearly ruined my life.

It’s a disease that many people have, and it’s a disease that’s extremely difficult to see or diagnose because it’s so commonplace in our current culture.

In fact, you just might have this disease yourself. And, if you do, it really doesn’t matter how much money you make, it will never be enough. If you have this disease, you’ll never feel prosperous or abundant.

Instead, what you will likely do is constantly compromise your life, your time, your energy, your attention, and your relationships.

The worst part is, you won’t even know you are doing it.

If you have it, this disease is blinding because it makes you think you don’t have what you need, and that you must compromise because if you don’t, you’ll starve, or be homeless, or never be able to support yourself, or not be good enough, or never prove it to them, or  … well, you know the stories, I am sure, because you’ve got your own personal version of it, probably secretly motivating you, any possibly even in ways you can’t even see.

As a result of this disease, you have thoroughly convinced yourself you have to work that job you hate, or stay in that marriage or relationship you can’t stand, or go to that event you really don’t want to go to, or be friends with that person you would rather just not, or invest in that company that you know is hurting the planet, or buy that disposable thing because you can’t afford the one that’s more expensive, but won’t end up in the landfill, or not do that thing you really want to do, and you just know would change your life …

… because, well, you don’t have enough money to make a different choice.

Do you see what I’m saying here?

You long for prosperity and abundance, and yet every choice isyou based on a diseased reality, a distorted view.

How much would you have to have before you stopped compromising?

It doesn’t matter. Because if you are compromising now, there’s no amount of money that will ever be enough, not until you see the disease that has been running your life, wake up from it, and start making your choices with your eyes wide open, clear, sober, awake and aware.

So, what is this disease?

It’s called money dysmorphia. And it’s the distorted view that most of us have about money that causes us to make poor decisions about, well, everything. But, mostly it causes us to make poor decisions about how we use our non-renewable assets, our time, our energy and our attention.

And the really sad part of this is that money is infinitely renewable. You can always, always, always make more money. But once you’ve given up your time, your energy and your attention, it’s gone forever.

The good news is that once you see your money dysmorphia, you can begin to awaken to right relationship with time, money and how you get paid, in a way that will bring you all the prosperity you want and need and help you to understand the true purpose of your family wealth.

The Shadow of Inheritance

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If you accept that you are here for a specific purpose of collective healing, and that your unique purpose is to heal a specific thread of the ancestral line, you begin to realize that you’ve inherited a set of wounds that influence your choices and behaviors and experience of life today.

And, here’s the part you may not have considered. You will pass on these wounds, if you do not do the work within your own self, starting right now, to heal them.

In just the same way your parents passed these wounds on to you, in spite of their best efforts. And their parents to them. And so on and on, going back to the beginning of us as people.

Throughout the past generations, we didn’t think much about what we passed on at the cellular (epigenetic) level. We only thought about what we passed on via the surface in the form of money, jewels, land and other assets.

And it’s only recently that anyone other than the most wealthy even gave it much thought at all.   Everyone else, lived their lives and died, owning nothing, passing on nothing, or so they thought.

But we’ve recently begun to become aware that certain aspects of us result from genes that were turned on and off in our ancestors, based on the lifestyle choices they made. The study of epigenetics, which first came online only in 1942, has had a resurgence in interest since the 1990s.

And now, it turns out, that these lifestyle choices and events that our ancestors experienced don’t just affect our genes, but the exact experiences our ancestors had “can reappear in the behaviors and symptoms of our children.” Mark Wolynn, It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, page 117.

What we have not been seeing, and is just now becoming clear, is that all along we’ve been passing on something far more valuable, pervasive and hidden than money and illness, and that something is our culture, our ways of being, our neuroses, our thought patterns, our control mechanisms and paradigms.

And in just the same way the Kings and Queens could plan for and prepare to leave their riches behind, and we can pre-emptively prevent disease by looking at our genes and making choices to excise parts that would manifest in illness, now with eyes wide open we can see the true nature of our family wealth, heal what’s been unseen and leave a legacy of conscious evolution.

It is our job, those of us with parents still living and children growing up, that are in the best position to do so.

I call to you now to awaken and see your role as a Priest or Priestess of your lineage, incarnated at this time to heal those parts that we do not want to be unconsciously passed down any longer.

Just like we can genetically modify crops and breed for the super crops, we can genetically modify our species. It does not require us to rely on the super freaky AI technology or the singularity for us to do it.

It simply requires us to come ever more deeply into our own humanity, our feeling self, our empathetic and scared heart, and be gentle with each other and ourselves, especially our parents and our kids.

When we think of inheritance, money is what most often comes to mind.

But there is another inheritance that is far more pervasive, far less conscious and far more important to plan for, though most people don’t. And it is far more impactful.

Even as I am intimately familiar with it, I find it hard to write about. The words don’t come easily because the concepts feel so new and maybe even foreign.

Money will come and go. The inheritance of who you are, will not.

And our purpose is to heal the wounds of these past ancestral lines so we can live into the next stage of evolution with more freedom and liberation to manifest the dreams of our hearts.

Each human cell in our body has 2 intertwined strands of DNA. One from our mom & one from our dad. The extent to which we feel complete and resolved around love from and for our parents, influences the level to which our cells feel whole & right. No amount of personal growth, altered states, transformation or meditation can make the cells in your very being feel integrated, if we cannot access the love to & from our parents. Our connection to our parents is the original portal to life itself. It’s how we link into the great chain of being. If we can find what’s sacred in the connection with our makers, we’re more in touch with our divinity.” — Annie Lalla