There aren’t too many people who do what they do, especially in the North Bay, despite the Bay Area being home to numerous millionaires and billionaires. But the field of what the Jansens call “wealth dynamic coaching” and DiFuria and Goldbart call “family wealth consulting” is growing, thanks in part to the vast amount of financial wealth millennials and Gen Xers expect to inherit from their boomer parents as well as the number of millionaires and billionaires who earned their money through technology and startups. In fact, the number of wealthy individuals globally is expected to rise by 28.1% by 2028, according to the Wealth Report , published by Knight Frank, a London global property consultant. The 2023 Global Wealth Report , published by USB, a multinational investment bank and financial services company based in Switzerland, projects that the number of millionaires will reach 86 million by 2028 and the number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs), people with a net worth of at least $30
million, will rise to 372,000 across the globe. DiFuria, Goldbart and the Jansens got into the business for different reasons, but all agree there’s a huge and growing need for what they do. “Talking about sex and money are taboo. Sex today is less taboo to talk about than money,” says DiFuria. “Many people go to a therapist and hear, ‘You have money, what’s the problem?’ So, they really need people who understand it more fully. People don’t know where to go or who to talk about it with because it can be embarrassing, it can be shameful.” There isn’t much sympathy for wealthy people, they admit. Yet, all people have problems. “It’s that ‘cry me a river’ reflex,” says Kjartan Jansen. “They can’t imagine that you can’t buy your way out of all the problems they might have. And that’s just not true. Most of the big challenges we have are non-monetary, especially on the relational side.” It was the dot-com boom that led DiFuria, a psychotherapist with a background in international business, and Goldbart, a psychologist, to found the Money, Meaning and Choices Institute. “When I started my private practice after I ended my business career, my colleagues were sending me and Stephen referrals, these men and women who were in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal , because they felt intimidated,” she says. “These people were young, with more money than they ever expected at such a young age, and they weren’t sure if they wanted to keep working but they were still productive and they weren’t sure what they wanted to do.” So DiFuria and Goldbart would ask them, what are your values, what’s meaningful to you, what would you like to do? “They were so struck by the questions that Stephen and I realized there’s something going on here that we need to pay attention to,” she says. Sudden Wealth Syndrome What was going on was what they call “sudden wealth syndrome”—the guilt, confusion, anxiety, and other emotions
A sudden inheritance or landing one’s first high-salary job can lead to family troubles, self-destructive behaviors or financial mismanagement.
that come with new or sudden wealth that sometimes can lead to family fractures, self-destructive behaviors and mismanaged money. Just think of how many professional athletes with multi- million-dollar contracts end up broke when they retire or are forced to end their careers due to injuries. Inspired by the work of James (Jay) E. Hughes, Jr., a now- retired estate attorney who is perhaps the most well-known and most-published person addressing the human side of wealth and the founder of the James E. Hughes, Jr. Foundation, they started their institute in the late 1990s, when few people recognized the need. “Honestly, we were laughed at when we started. ‘People with wealth actually have problems and you’re going to do that?’” DiFuria says with a laugh. “Now it’s taken very seriously.” She gives some credit to the media for exposing the issue. When the two coined the term “sudden wealth syndrome,” “the media went crazy all over the world,” she says. “People wondered how it could possibly happen that these people who are so rich be depressed, anxious, unaware, unconscious, etc.” But for the wealthy people themselves, having someone who understood what was happening to them felt like a huge relief. “It allowed them to feel that A, it was OK for them to talk about it; B, it was OK to do something about it; and C, have an outlet to do something about it,” she says. The Jansens started Graddha in 2016, prompted in part by Mill Valley native Marlis Jansen’s own experience with multi- generational family wealth. While at first she didn’t know the details of the family office—a structure that’s created to manage all the assets a family owns—and wasn’t too interested in learning about money or investing nor did her family push it upon her, she says she could feel the impact it had on her extended family nonetheless. “I could tell our family relationships were being permanently impacted by the business relationships in the
26 NorthBaybiz
September 2024
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